Marilyn Minter Quotes

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

Art is commenting on what's going on around you in your life.

Art is a direct reflection of the life you live. What you experience comes out in your work.

Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate...Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.

For every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work.

I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground.

I think a lot of actors, comedians, musicians, artists are drawn to this world, because you're allowed to excavate whatever it is that you're struggling with, and hopefully turn it into art.

I try to put my own history in my work.

Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.

However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.

I am an artist. For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul. And you are like in some kind of possession, where you are doing anything to get the visual. You become another person. You're becoming an artist in action. And then a lot of miracles come. A lot of discovering. It's a very complicated thing.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.

There's a lot of things you can't see if you aren't' looking.

Think of drawing as a way of talking about the things that interest you. Think of those wonderful documents, drawings made on scraps of paper by the lesser Dutch masters while they were wandering around market places and sitting in saloons.

Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.