John Ruskin Quotes

Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art.

What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.

I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.

The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.

Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It's part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

People say, 'Why don't you just paint with paintbrushes?' I say that I feel more connected to my painting using my skin. It's very tribal in a way - savage!

I'm not interested in pop art.

I'm actually really obsessed with folk art.

That's what New York is like - you can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.

The thing I'm obsessed with is really great bad paintings. I have a storage locker full of them and I want to give them their own museum. You don't even know who these artists are - you can buy them at garage sales, antique stores and places like that. They're brilliant because they were done with the intention of being great, but the artist sort of made a wrong turn. Some of them are hilarious and I can't get enough of them.

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this 'cause we both were outcasts: we wasn't allowed inside the galleries or inside Yankee Stadium. We were writing in the street and making music.

Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.

I paint the American scene.

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

I really like the language of painting.

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

I like the idea that cinema is a spectacle.