Aesthetic Conflict Quotes

Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.

My reputation was built on hostility. I had no friends and some very virulent enemies in the old-guard art scene when I began. They threw their heavy artillery against me. They were convinced I was perverting the public taste.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

I feel like when I fight it's an art, and Art isn't supposed to be 'nice', it isn't supposed to be liked. It's supposed to make you feel something.

I think good art happens on that edge between comfortable and in a lot of pain, you know what I mean?

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

I want color and form to have contradictorily functions.

O.P.N. has always been about reaching for some kind of liminal state in which opposing aesthetic forces become entangled and confused and equal.

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.

I loved the Limey [movie]! It's so violent! And yet it's so exquisitely romanticized in a sort of Japanese way, it's a samurai film. Coming out of that, I was really deeply conflicted, because a friend who had seen it said, it's beautiful, but it's not about anything. it's one micron thick.

An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict.