“The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that's there. We shouldn't think "This is good," or "This is bad," or "This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z." Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn't think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.”
Source: All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
“My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent. I have endured physical violence, I have even had my teeth broken. Sexuality, human emotion, everyday life, personal humiliation (you only have to watch television)—violence is part of human nature. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.
You are born, you fuck, you die. What could be more violent than that?”
“The Enlightenment project was doomed from the start, though, for though human beings run out of money, time, resources, energy, and desire, they never run out of the past. A war on the past will necessarily be endless, for no sooner has a man conquered the past than the very act of conquering becomes the past, as well.”
Source: Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
“Galli to Michelangelo: “In the days of the emperors, you would have been designing colosseums, baths, and reservoirs. Instead, you’ve created a soul.”
Source: The Agony and the Ecstacy
“Consider the cicadas...there's the droning of the cicadas, as a technical phenomenon of sound waves. Then there's the mystery of the noise, its vehement formlessness. Neither of these things can be painted. I paint what lies in between. When I paint, I am saying yes to something that can be neither agreed nor disagreed with.”
Source: Y/N
“Whenever the Bucharest Opera's curtain rose, the Iron Curtain seemed to go up with it...”
Source: Life in Opera Truth, Tempo, and Soul: Encounters with Stars, Innovators, and Leaders of Todays Opera World
“In the freezing darkness, the voices and the music alone wrapped the audience in beauty, emotion, and fantasy. The singing soothed, stirred, and seduced until you were madly in love, and became addicted. That was opera in its purest, most sincere form.”
Source: Life In Opera: Truth, Tempo and Soul: Encounters with Stars, Innovators and Leaders of Today's Opera World
“Do you ever feel like we are the universe’s date to a pig party?
Love,
The Human Race”
“In a prior age, the human experience was understood as the temporal embodiment of desire, delight, fear, grief, faith, love, hope, hatred, horror, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, sublimity, desperation, chagrin, anger, fury, wrath, distress, discomposure, shame, dignity, indignity, glory, contempt, slight, heartbreak, fondness, tenderness, adoration, infatuation, compassion, goodwill, worship, sorrow, anguish, despair, woe, dejection, despondency, duty, angst, reverence, respect, esteem, exaltation, melancholy, disquiet, weariness, felicity, glee, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, euphoria, exhilaration, rhapsody, brotherhood, contemplation, mediation, surrender, fancy, impulse, yearning, thirst, hankering, pining, enthusiasm, need, obligation, fancy, mystery, helplessness, luck, recklessness, boldness, fearlessness, wildness, sorrow, regret, gloom, heavyheartedness, and dreaminess and ten thousand others. These are the sentiments which great art compels us to feel. But mediocre art truncates the human experience. It prunes and lops off all the diversity and richness of life and leaves us with little more than lust, amusement, self-fulfillment, and the resentment which comes from our endless search for the power that now attends victimhood.”
Source: Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
“Even if I am broken into many pieces, I know you can still make me a piece of art in another form; every scar will become an etching that tells a unique story”