Michael Heizer Quotes

In any great art, you create a world, and you invite people into that world, and hopefully, it's fleshed out enough and you've explained it well enough.

Personally, I have had sometimes moments where I thought my idea behind the idea of a collection - the concept maybe - something that we don't see at the end on the catwalk, I think the way it was, the genesis in my mind, was probably artistic, an artistic approach.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Then I sit down, work at it, because now I have a convincing feeling about what that place wants to be, you see? And it's not just me. Me and my talent comes in taking that consensus and then making something wonderful out of it - a work of art.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

I'm a designer of more than clothes. I am a designer of a very creative concept.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.

I guess artists are living inspiration. There's something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It's not unified.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

No matter what I've worked on or what art practices I've delved into, they've always been an attempt to world-build.

All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

I have admired David Bromley's work for years. He possesses such a wild and vivid imagination and really sees the beauty in everything.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.