Phil Elverum Quotes

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

My painting does not come from the easel.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it, and I put pictures in it.

I really don't have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

No matter how fast I could do it with the digital camera I don't think I would get the same thing out of it. The passion I have for formulating an idea stands alone. It is the important essence of what I do.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

In the same way I accumulate objects, I also accumulate images, and I find them arranging themselves into categories, too. And some images insist on being painted; others don't.

I think art, at its best, happens on a conscious and a subconscious level.

It used to kind of upset me when I'd be working on a part in my hotel room, and I'd get an idea for a song and find myself on the guitar for an hour when I should be working on my lines. But I've discovered that when I start to shake up my creativity it wants to be expressed in all kinds of different ways. They all kind of inform each other.