Terrance Hayes Quotes

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.

It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

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

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

Art is a continuum.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

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.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

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

My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values.

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

The artist is called a creator.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.