Quotes About Art

There is no singing anymore, everything is yelling and shouting and rapping and that is real boring to a guy like me.

If I could have drawn a cat yelling for lasagna every day for 15 years and have them pay me $30 million to do so, I would have.

I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills; keep artists happy; and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

When 'Carmen' premiered in 1875, it was panned by the critics. It survived 45 performances. It was called a musical and moral outrage. After Bizet died, at age 37, 'Carmen' became wildly popular. If you believe in your creation, and the rest of the world is laughing or yelling 'Boo,' don't give up.

Sometimes, we've made songs where we're angry and yelling, and then there are some songs where we're just having fun and dancing and happy.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with base notes, or dark lake with the treble.

I like light green, sometimes red is fun to look at, not a fan of yellow, unless it's in a rainbow or on a coffee mug or on a happy face.

I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunshiny and bright.

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.

Purple and yellow are my colors.

If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.

' Shoes' is very pink and yellow, and maybe orange, very bright, whereas 'Midnight Moonlight' is purple and blue and - I don't know - gray.

Very little thought goes into making this stuff I make. It is on impulse. I think of colors all day and suddenly if I think of ice blue, I wonder if red or yellow will go with it.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

I don't think the goal is, 'How big a star did you ever become?' I think the goal is, 'Were you able to express yourself?' And if you're able to say yes, in any field, you've won. If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit - if it's solving that part of your brain saying, 'I need to do this,' you've won.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

Yes, anybody can dance. Whether it is right or wrong, that doesn't matter.

Yes, every venture is always filled with apprehensions. But if we were to conduct ourselves continuously on that aspect, then we would lose the most important reason to be in this profession: to challenge the art of and be part of what is commonly known as our creative instincts.

Yes, there are times when I get extremely depressed and how I sublimate those feelings is through music.