I've always been doing some sort of art. I started off, when I was very young, painting.
There's no background of creativity in my family; there are no actors or musicians.
Having been raised by actors who love moral ambiguity and flawed protagonists, I feel like it's sort of in the blood to want to take it on.
Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.
I don't feel comfortable doing movies. It's not what I trained to do. I trained to be a theater actress. You put me on a stage in front of 2,000 people, I know what to do.
I grew up in a Southside suburb of Chicago. It was idyllic. But I was plunked into a family that was not artistic and didn't know how to deal with my emotions.
My parents never mentioned anything about fashion in our household, instead we used to talk about literature, theatre, and arts...this is why I have kept a real relation with the Art world, by putting books from the beginning in my shops' windows.
I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.
I never had vocal lessons, dance classes, or any of the things my peers had.
I'm a better economist than I was a sax player.
I've been doing visual stuff for as long as I've been making records; in fact, for longer.
I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.
For one year I did go to Performing Arts School, and I had very weird friends.
Well, I was a drama kid.
My whole background, my whole life was just lots and lots of theater, a lot of that being musical theater.
I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.
I'd come into filmmaking as a painter so, for me, making 'Good Will Hunting' was experimental because I didn't know how to do it.
I have been drawing and creating visual works my entire life, as long as I can remember.
You can't deny RCA's past and its history. I was also on Capitol Records, so I have that past history.
I am not from a musical family.
For me, I was a musician long before I was an actor.
I grew up doing musical theater.
Both my parents have done considerable work in theatre and I have grown up with that culture, but I still felt that I needed formal training.
I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.
Before I got into stand-up, I used to be a hip-hop dancer in a crew, and my name was J. Smoove, and my partner was J. Groove.
