Craig McCracken Quotes

Straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental.

To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

I'd begun to collect things that were lying in piles on the floor of my studio. I had run out of space, and I started to build shelves. I turned around one day and realized that that was the vehicle for carrying so many of the things that I was looking at and talking about, so they went from the walls to the works.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.

Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modeling the cat I just didn't feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

Design must be functional, and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

In art economy is always beauty.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

I can tell really early on in a painting if I'm going to toss it or not.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

I am quite convinced now... that the actual training of drawing cartoons - which is, of course, my style - led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible, and so, too, must the 'Spot' books.

All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

I think I work much the same way I always have. I'm trying to interpret something emotionally visually. I'm reading the brief or article, or listening to the music, and deciding where that sends me, and what would it look like.

If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of 'Vincent', I thought of his picture 'Starry Night.' It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.