Studio Practice Quotes

The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

I would like to be an artist who works in a very closed ambience.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

It's dedicating yourself to your craft. Spending thousands of hours in a studio learning how to write a song, learning how to play different chords, training yourself to sing. You know, to get better and better.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

For the most part, I like to record music as I write it.

I always want to be growing in my craft. Any artist should - whether you paint, whether you do music or film - always grow and study.

Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.

I want to be in the studio. I want to be doing something. You just do whatever is at hand, and you don't even worry about whether it's going to be interesting or not interesting to anybody else-or even yourself. You just have to make something.

I had a studio visitor ask me when a piece was complete, and afterward, I realized I was kind of annoyed by the question. I wrote down to myself, 'Nothing's ever finished' as an operating value.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

Our dad was always like, 'Look, if you're musical, if you live and breathe music and want to play an instrument, that's not something that's on me to put on you. If you're passionate, you will come to my studio every day after school and watch me work because you can't live without it.

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

And I usually use myself as a model, posing in front of a mirror as I dab the strokes on the canvas.

The School of the Art Institute is an extraordinary teaching institution by the fact that it believes that active studio artists are good teachers. That may seem an obvious statement, but in higher education, it is often the student's course evaluations that win the day with administrators.