Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.
I can't live with art: I'd spend too much time tweaking it.
There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.
I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.
That's the job of art: to undo the logic of the world.
Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.
The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.
A restaurant is a compendium of choices that the owner has made. If you look around a restaurant, everything represents a choice: the kind of salt shaker that's on the table, the art on the walls, the uniforms on the waiters.
You wouldn't have the same art on the walls at every restaurant or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.
The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.
I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.
I think it would be very difficult to maintain one kind of art or whatever for your whole life. I think it's unrealistic.
I hope that through my work, artists will take some chances, break some rules, and make art that comes from inside of them. I would like to be remembered as a kind person, a great Mom, and a bit unruly - in a good way!
