Mickalene Thomas Quotes

I believe acting to be my own journey through connection more than anything else, but that's only my take on it.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

People should listen to my music if they just want to know me better.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.

When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.

A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.

I'm a horrible person. And it's just coming out in my work.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

We don't take photographs with our cameras, we take them with our hearts and our minds. They are a reflection of ourselves...wha t we are and what we think.

Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.

Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

When I see someone who reads something of mine and draws something out of it that's very different from my perspective, I think that's actually cool. Sometimes it's worrisome when you feel they badly misinterpret it, but it just says that they're thinking, and they're bringing their own interpretation to bear on it. [...] That's part of the wonderful thing about putting words into the world, and if I was worried about that, I couldn't be a writer.