Ed Harris Quotes

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

I don't think you can be taught how to make art. You can be coached, but on a fundamental level you have to figure it out for yourself. You have to learn how your own mind works, figure out your own relationship to the art; you essentially have to invent it completely for yourself.

I have these habits. I'm not a crazy artist. Or am I?

Every good painter paints what he is.

I found I am not an anarchistic form creator; I'm intuitive, and I'm trying to figure out a way to explore human fragility.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.

I try to write relevant songs about life and whatever I'm going through and whatever people are going through.

I believe that my music is just about feelings, and the style is just a side effect.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

I never analyzed whether I had a style or whether I didn't. I wouldn't be able to describe my style or even tell if I have one or not.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

You are the accumulations of your experiences at any given point. And when you express something those things come out. The thing is I hate seeing my films when I'm done with them, so I don't look back as a chart of my life, but I leave it as a kind of chart. Though, it is a photograph, captured.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

You have to search the absolute demons of your soul to make a great record.

It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing.

A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.

A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

I'm constantly striving to break through to something new. You try to maintain a neutral approach to your work, and not be too hard on yourself.