Frank Black Quotes

I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.

When I do my own books, I take it as more of my own confessional, but when I illustrate for other people, it is intriguing because I feel like I shouldn't be stepping too much into the limelight. It's like playing the piano while someone else is singing.

My sketchbook is not sacrosanct, and my children would draw on one page while I drew on the other. It was something we shared.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

As an artist, I understand that, and I value the creative input of the artist.

I'm drawn to people rather than mediums - directors, writers, actors.

My wife and I water color, paint water colors.

I truly believe that cinema is a collaborative effort, and as long as I get to tell, and be part of, interesting stories and work with genuine people, I don't see any project as a 'risk.'

That's the great part about arts - someone taking your work and making it something else; it's becomes a true collaboration.

My favorite thing as a performing artist is to get a pile of raw material from a writer who says, 'Will you help me make this real?' There's nothing like starting from scratch.

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

It's a collaborative art form where we can both learn something from the other. That's what you want from the relationship with a director.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

I'm a bit of a lefty. I like the idea of art and music collectives.

I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid. I think you see that nowadays, in this postmodern context, there's much more use of different mediums in contemporary art. For me, if you're a creative person, you can choose to make a painting, you can choose to make a film.

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.

Comic-strip artists do not make good husbands, and God knows they do not make good comic strips.

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.

I like the fact that I can rep New York, but my style does not - I'm not trapped in a New York thing. I can do art songs with other artists and it's seamless.

I don't agree with most forms of censorship, and I especially don't agree with the idea that one needs to be from the same cultural, ethnic, or religious background as the subjects they portray in order to be qualified to portray those subjects. I believe that compassion and empathy should cross all of those category barriers, and the conversations art creates can be inflammatory initially, but I think are most often constructive and healing in the long run.

I just make what I'm making, and then one day I won't want to make it anymore. I think that's a luxury we should be able to have as people, especially as artists.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

I would love to do comedies and I would love to do dramas. I'm very passionate about art, music, drawing, acting, so I'd like to have the chance to get the larger choice regarding acting.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Writing about something specific, in my mind, was overwhelming, so I wrote about art because I love art and I know I can say a couple of funny things about art.