artistic introspection Quotes

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.

I've been really lucky to spend some time around actors and artists I really admire. One thing I gathered from asking a lot of questions is that part of this job and this life we've chosen is doing personal exploration in front of an audience. In a lot of ways, that's what art is: personal searching with people watching.

It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.

I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.

This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.

I feel like interviews are the only time I actually analyze my own work.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process.

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

In all of my films, there is a desire to testify, to interrogate the past.

Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.

I feel like I have a kind of mirror blindness where it's hard for me to characterize or analyze my own work. I suspect I'm not unique in this regard.

I'm constantly on my toes and re-examining my own music.

The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.

It's rare for artists to really stare deeply at themselves in the mirror, literally, because there's constantly a mirror on you.

Oh, I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints.

Every character in each of my movies is a different side of myself.