Art Discovery Quotes

While it may be a really trying, weird time for the art world, I see good work all the time. If you just go around to that many galleries, and if you stay open, you're going to see work with enough energy and surprise. I don't think I've ever gone to the galleries without coming home thinking, Gee, I now know something I didn't know this morning.

I discovered the 7th art at home when I was kid, through Charlie Chaplin's movies and those of my father who shot documentaries. He was my biggest influence. So I took his camera and started shooting.

Exposing yourself to many kinds of art can only lead to amazing things. It helps you learn about your own art, your own taste, what kind of art you want to create for yourself.

A brief visit to Nepal started my insatiable love for Asian art.

I was truly ignorant about art before the film.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.

I don't see myself as a great discoverer of artists, like Charles Saatchi.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

I didn't know that there was such a thing as butter carving. But then, I poked around a little bit. A quick Google search will show you 55,000 images of butter carvings, and they're extraordinary.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant.

When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

I only learned about Darger a couple years ago, when I kept seeing his name in reference to my artwork, so I looked him up. I wouldn't consider him an influence because I'd already established my current style before learning about him, but I enjoy his work a lot.

Lately, I've discovered the Hellenistic bronzes. I'd never really thought about them much, but then there was this marvelous exhibition - many of them Roman, some of them Greek, all kinds of wonderful standing figures or heads or horses. It all suddenly became a passion of mine. I finally got to see that exhibition, which led to the idea of bringing up the statue in the film.

I don't plan out my visits rigorously, but I do have a list of about 125 New York galleries, alternative spaces, museums, and so forth that I visit regularly. That's the closest thing I have to a strategy: I go to a lot of places, many that artists don't visit.

I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.

Sometimes people walk into plays by accident - they don't even know what they're looking at; they just think to give it a chance. That can be the beginning of a long friendship.

There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.

I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

By the time I discovered Chicano painters in the mid-'80s, I recognized that these guys were really world-class painters, but they weren't getting any attention, which was good in one sense in that I could get their work for cheaper!

I had always loved Haitian art, but I stumbled onto Haiti quite by accident. I went there on vacation after finishing a movie called 'The Delta Factor,' and I met lot of painters and fell in love with their folk art.

Two of my favorite artists are Josh Smith and Joe Bradley. But I argued against them for years, until I grew to love them and felt stupid for my immediate reaction towards their work.