Masaba Gupta Quotes

I really enjoy squeezing out a big lump of paint directly onto the canvas and leaving it; fresh, immediate and sometimes shocking.

I usually sit around with the guitar in reach and grab it when I get an idea. Sometimes it lasts five minutes, and sometimes it lasts all day.

You make different colors by combining those colors that already exist.

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.

I had always done these 3D things that you could walk through. They were always done off the seat of my pants without blueprints or course.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

If I decide to make a coat red in the show, it's not just red, I think: is it communist red? Is it cherry cordial? Is it ruby red? Or is it apple red? Or the big red balloon red?

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

I've got to be honest: I don't listen to any music now. I don't even listen to mine! I like to walk fresh into the studio and have ideas that come straight out of me.

I'm thinking about color all the time. Sometimes even as far back as the plotting sequence.

When I am making a film, it's very instinctive, it's not preset.

I base everything on my instinctual approach. There's something very satisfying in that creativity, and it's a bit like an infant drawing.

When I try and extract what it is about my music that I do or love or try to create, I'm never aware of it at the time. I just make something.

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth.

My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is.

To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

A working artist is a playing artist.

Any art that you are playing based on effort, loses something. I think that most of the time it should be something that happens, and you are inspired, and you just feel and follow your instincts. The best chiseled sculptures happen when the sculptor looks at the stone and says "I saw this sculpture in the stone, and I had to get it out." It's not contrived.

There are certain things I do because I am creatively inspired and artistic.

When I was living in Mexico, I started reassessing my drawing style, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more "true" to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader's imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it's a lot faster and more fun to do.

My production team doesn't like not knowing what anything is going to look like, but creatively, that's fun.

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?