Writing the record for me - every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record's finished.
Any art that you are playing based on effort, loses something. I think that most of the time it should be something that happens, and you are inspired, and you just feel and follow your instincts. The best chiseled sculptures happen when the sculptor looks at the stone and says "I saw this sculpture in the stone, and I had to get it out." It's not contrived.
I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.
I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write … This is a true freestyle in general. I put a beat, I said some stuff, I retain ideas, I do it again, with a particular intonation, I test, and especially I record live.
I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.
'Painting like a child' isn't a negative for me... it's something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso's drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.
Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.
My recent drawings that personal ones aren't fashion-related. I sometimes sit and draw people on the bus, or some fantasy hybrid animal. You know, wherever the hand will lead.
I've got to be honest: I don't listen to any music now. I don't even listen to mine! I like to walk fresh into the studio and have ideas that come straight out of me.
Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.
I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.
I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?
The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.
First thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.
I never have a plan of what I am going to draw.
To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
I think there's something really freeing about improv, that it's a collective, creative, in-the-moment piece. That's really exciting and really frustrating, because it's there and gone. There's an amazing interaction with the audience that happens because they are very much another scene partner.
The whole 'I Told You,' there's nothing written. That was all out of the feeling. That's why the album is so incredible to me - it's all out of the heart; I didn't take time to pre-calculate it.
It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.
I really enjoy squeezing out a big lump of paint directly onto the canvas and leaving it; fresh, immediate and sometimes shocking.
For me, it's mostly about having stuff on the street. You're walking down the street, you do it every day, and suddenly there's something that wasn't there yesterday: something bright and cheerful and different. It might stay there for a year; maybe it will disappear.
I'm inspired by Jackson Pollock; splashing layer upon layer, using different materials, experimenting with new methods to produce something fresh. I'd love to be able to create in this way!
I don't really have studios. I wander around around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.
