Chris Hondros Quotes

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I'll ask the students, 'How many of you have been to a museum this year?' Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.

A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

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.

I just love drawing on past human cultures; that's a thrill for me.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles - like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

I think that painting is a very ancient form of expression.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.

Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.

My cubist paintings are my most Mexican.

I'm using the grid as formation. I wanted a relationship between the paintings and videos so that way when you are looking at the videos there's a direct relationship to the paintings.

Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.

I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

Your subjects have had a history - try to reveal it in your picture.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.