My hands look like my dad's and my mom's put together. She's a piano player, he was an artist, and I use the creative qualities I got from them in my fighting. But I don't just destroy with my hands; I also create: I cook and make art and garden.
Picasso said, 'Art is a lie that tells the truth.' What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?
Great art picks up where nature ends.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there.
The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.
A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.
Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
Telling stories with visuals is an ancient art. We've been drawing pictures on cave walls for centuries. It's like what they say about the perfect picture book. The art and the text stand alone, but together, they create something even better. Kids who need to can grab onto those graphic elements and find their way into the story.
Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
I used the second year of my MFA program to write a young adult novel and began pursuing picture books as well. I loved the economy of this art form, choosing, with pristine attention, the exact right words to tell the exact right story.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: writing picture books is an art - the art of word choice.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.
I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think 'Pigeon Feathers' was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.
With regards to music, I don't want to pigeonhole myself and say I am a musician or a visual artist, because I feel like it's all-encompassing, and I feel like every bit of my art is related to the other.
I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.
In the early 1970s, I headed to graduate school at the University of Utah and joined the pioneering program in computer graphics because I realized that's where I could combine my interests in art and computer science.
I went to art school in the days when it was what you did if you didn't want to be like everybody else. You wanted to be strange and different, and art school encouraged that. We hated the drama students - they were guys with pipes and cardigans.
The Internet is both great and terrible. As a source of information, a tool for delivering music and art, it's great. But spamming ads and piracy of music is terrible. It's stealing.
