I used to spend time in my great grandfather’s [Leon Trotsky’s] study. My relatives used to tell me stories about all the meetings with writers, painters, intellectuals, about the relationship between Leon and Natalya and his friendship with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and her sister Cristina. We grew up surrounded by an atmosphere of support and love. Our parents instilled in us social compromise, sensitiveness and a sense of respect for others
A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn't find out about until after graduate school.
Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It's strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.
The relationship between art and a job is not quite linear, but I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid.
While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside.
In 1978, I was in Paris - I was in someone's car and listening to the radio - and on comes Paco de Lucia. I'd never heard of this chap, and I just thought, 'I have to meet him.' And I was very lucky; I found him very quickly. Crazily enough, he happened to be in Paris!
I don't aim to make art in a vacuum - you want people to like it.
You're only dealing with whatever you know, which is a very small part of it and later on it'll look like it has something to do with the period. Obviously, the artists have something to do with one another. They tend to set up certain common qualities among themselves.
The more film festivals, theatrical shows, and music performances and visual arts we have, the less chances there are for war. Art is hope, and it is found in hope, and that's why we need to share our experiences and cherish art.
It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.
Just as sport can, art has the capacity to cross so many boundaries like education, race and religion.
The joy of juxtaposition is endless.
Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.
One of the things I want to do as an artist is to connect generations.
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
I didn't have no college friends. All the artists the college folks were listening to were my homies. I was leaving class, literally, to record with them.
I've never been invited to do an exhibition or do a talk in England, except once, about 10 years ago. I've given talks all across Canada, many in the United States, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan - but not England.
I just love what art can do and what it means for us; that it can cross barriers. It can speak to us across space and time and culture.
The Met is such a powerful place for me because it's a natural connection between the ancient world and the modern world. And when you're dealing with ancient mythology, trying to put a modern spin on it, you really can't do much better than to call on the Met.
Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another.
All the people I hung out with were musicians.
By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!
The arts are tremendously powerful in bringing people with opposing views together.
I love the dancers in the Bolshoi, but all of my Moscow friends are outside the company. A friend introduced me to Vika Gazinskaya, a well-known Russian designer. I met her group. The rest is history.
