Thomas McDonell Quotes

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

Don't think about making art.

I think of my art materials not as junk but as garbage. Manure, actually: it goes from being the waste material of one being to the life-source of another.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

I love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's an essential ingredient to making, to art. Certainly on a practical level it is. But on the other hand, I think it's a myth that the creative inspiration is locked up inside the person and just needs a quiet space and the right "serious" brooding moment to get released.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

Designis a revelation to me. It's like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

As a kid I was creative.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Creativity is how we cope with creation. While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable, or even pointless, creativity is always meaningful.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

It's good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that's better than you'd imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.