Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.
Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
A face is a road map of someone’s life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there’s a great deal that’s communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
Inspiration is for amateurs.
While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.
You know, the way art history is taught, often there’s nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
Art saved my life in two ways. It made me feel special, because I could do things my friends couldn’t, but it also gave me a way to demonstrate to my teacher that, despite the fact that I couldn’t write a paper or do math, I was paying attention.
Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you’re in trouble.
I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.
The thing that interests me about photography, and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
If you’re overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.
Neurologically, I’m a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I’m sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.
It doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.