I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work.
Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
Americans have perfected the art of reducing complicated truths into formulas and products. We're desperate for instant, visible, measurable ways of knowing God, instead of trusting that it's complicated and a mystery.
There's this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall.
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.
In a time of fractured politics, our need for unifying cultural events is more acute, and particularly our need for creators who do not deny the people their art because of the votes they cast.
The kind of improv that I'm particularly addicted to is the kind that... aims at creating a momentary, fragmentary experience that has a totality to it. It's kind of like fireworks. It's the more ephemeral of art forms - once it's gone, it's gone, baby.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.
There's nothing in Hollywood that's inherently detrimental to good art. I think that's a fallacy that we've created because we frame the work that way too overtly. 'This is Hollywood.' 'This isn't Hollywood.' It's like, 'No, this is actually all Hollywood.' People are just framing them differently.
I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.
You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.
It really has become the singular motivation in my life - to surrender to the art and to the free expression of what I may be experiencing in my life spiritually. It is really hard in the face of people who don't get it, but what do you do?
I think in America there's this free flow between fashion, art, architecture, music and design. In Europe, it's more segregated between those different disciplines, I think.
Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
