Walead Beshty Quotes

My works look to how images are produced, but specially based upon how the material reacts.

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.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

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 want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

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 had a natural feeling for sculpture, and the nudes are my sculpture.

When I draw something, the brain and the hands work together.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity.

What I do is create images, period.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.

I doubt Picasso ever painted a picture in an hour, he took his time, looked at every detail and made sure it was perfect.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.