Marcel Dzama Quotes

I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

I love creating images, of course, because I'm an artist.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.

As soon as I start reading, drawing comes to me more easily. I find I work in my sketchbooks more. But if I'm working on a new show, my reading completely stops except when I'm on a plane. I take a stack of New Yorkers with me. I feel awful about those stacks of New Yorkers.

When I look through my sketchbooks, they bring back moments that I would otherwise have completely forgotten.

I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Seven days a week, I'm always drawing, doodling, or painting, whether I'm in the studio or on a plane.

I've always been a doodler.

I don't tend to say it's time for one of this or that genre. Things flow to you in a strange way, and why you bump into a certain kind of thing in one moment is...it's hard to explain.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

A lot of times I'll doodle on something while I'm doing interviews, because sometimes I'm on the phone for three or four hours and I want to get something going. I'll just start from a scribble, or something that someone else already put on the page.

The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious...that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth.

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.