Kerry James Marshall Quotes

Everything we do is art, philosophy, mysticism, cultural commentary.

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

The arts don't exist in isolation.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

Art and life are inseparable.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word "art". If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all.

To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

I could take a photo, but I'd rather paint a picture.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

I think you too recognize the important relationship between philosophy and art, and it is just this relationship that most painters deny. The great masters do grasp it, unconsciously; but I believe that a painter's conscious spiritual knowledge will have a much greater influence upon his art, and that it would be due only to a weakness in him, or lack of genius, should this spiritual knowledge be harmful to his art.

Painters used red like spice

I'm a painter first, and a musician second.

The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.