I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.
I would have rebelled against parental authority, no matter what. When I was 15, I started painting my face and making my own clothes.
I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.
I remember I had an aunt that lived in a house that had this beautiful ceramic wall that was entirely a painting of a peacock.
A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape.
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.
Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.
There's not a lot of pictorial evidence from the Highlands, because only the very wealthy had their portraits painted - but there is one well-known painting of the two sons of the Duke of Argyll, wearing tartan.
A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.
From playwrights I had never heard of and performance forms I had never seen to sculpture and painting, I gained immense experience as an actor in National School of Drama (NSD). I discovered what discipline and good taste in the theatre means.
Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.
Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.
Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting.
There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
Wine pricing is an art - like painting.
I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.