Visual artist Quotes

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free.

In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within

I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint.

Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.

Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.

Part of me has always resisted the Western clichéd image of Muslim women, depicting them as nothing more than silent victims. My art, without denying 'repression,' is a testimony to unspoken female power and the continuing protest in Islamic culture.

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together.

Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins.

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.

Art is the highest form of hope.

There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint.

We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good.

I studied at UC Santa Cruz before going on to do a grad program at UCLA.

Santa Cruz was like an awesome hippie summer camp. I got to take a vacation from reality and hang out on beaches and in forests.

Only by chancing the ridiculous, can I hope for the sublime.

Perhaps we don't want to come face to face with the unsurrendered areas of our lives. We like our lives just as they are, even if it is less than God's best.

The pictures were painted directly through me, without preliminary drawings and with great power. I had no idea what the pictures would depict and still I worked quickly and surely without changing a single brush-stroke.

I've always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity. I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps 'we' (women and men) can all work together in art world actions.

Three things are needed for success in painting and sculpture: to see beauty when young and accustom oneself to it, to work hard, and to obtain good advice.

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

I find that through the study of women, you get to the heart - the truth - of the culture.

Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.

My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.

In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment.

I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting.

My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich.

I'm really interested in social justice, and if an artist has a certain power of being heard and voicing something important, it's right to do it. It could still be done in such a way that it's not aggressive or overly didactic. I'm trying to find that form.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas.

Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

Cubism came about because, in the process of analyzing form, something that lay in the form, a plane, could be lifted out to float on its own.

Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.

Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

I always had a sense that clothes, be it uniform or vintage, could help to create a character.

There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.

Impressionism came about because it suddenly became apparent that pure colours mix in the eye in a more dazzling way than they have ever been mixed in paint.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images.

I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

Being political is an integral part of being Iranian. Our lives are defined by politics.

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity.

Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands.

Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.

Every change is a form of liberation.

My mother used to say a change is always good even if it's for the worse.

I wanted to paint pictures of people.

I thought, "Why bother doing anything else. Everything else is a waste of time. I want to tell stories about people and their feelings and emotions."

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

Here I am, the artist, the person, the black woman, and the stereotype.

I'm using myself and it has nothing to do with my muses or other women. It has to do with me. You see parts of my body moving, very collage like, flashing, and not speaking, just laying on a couch, looking out at the viewer.

My work speaks of the finite and the infinite, of the macroscopic and the microscopic, the internal and external, by the masculine and feminine powers, but sex is like a snake, it slithers through everything.

Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.

Fifty years ago, the spoken word reigned, but during the last fifty years, the power has gone over to pictures.

Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here.

It simply offers another dimension. I'm not sure if it's a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality.

Even in its darkness, it has this picturesque element.

It's something about the human condition. It's not the water itself-it's humanity's relationship to water, because that’s almost a human need, that water be a positive force.

I don't like to look sloppy. I'm a girly-girl.

To find one's way anywhere one has to find one's door, just like Alice, you see.

You take too much of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another and you get too small. You've got to find your own doorway into things.

Drawing and masturbation were the first sacred experiences I remember.

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence -- you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform.

Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.

If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents.

Art is free, but of course you have to be alert to catch it when it comes onto the canvas. I don’t choose the ideas, they choose me. I don’t wait for them. They come without my permission!