Quotes About Expression

The most irritating experience for an artist is to have his work criticized before it is finished.

I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

The less apparent the means and manner of the artist, the more directly will his work appeal to the understanding and the feelings.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.

Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work.

If you can't make art, make your life a work of art.

For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does

I think directing is part play, part work, not just all work, because I think you always have to play. I think that's ultimately why I got into making movies, is because I love to play.

The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.

People generally are more interested in my work when they get to know me. Serious collectors like to get not just a painting but a piece of the artist.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

I get so tired of people saying, 'Oh, you only make fantasy films and this and that', and I'm like, 'Well no, fantasy is reality', that's what Lewis Carroll showed in his work.

You always feel very vulnerable when you put your work out there. You feel a kind of nakedness. And you expose something of the inner workings of the way you experience life.

Generalised anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work - though it's not necessarily evident in anything that's finished.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.

A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.

My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.