When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.
Interpretation
The act of drawing is essential to creativity and expression.
Ellsworth Kelly emphasizes the importance of drawing as a foundational aspect of artistic creation. He perceives a blank canvas as an opportunity to bring ideas to life, suggesting that the act of creating something from nothing is a powerful and transformative experience.
In practice
Using this quote during an art class to inspire students to explore their creativity.
Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.
If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.
Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.
To draw a tree, to pay such close attention to every aspect of a tree, is an act of reverence not only toward the tree, and toward the earth itself, but also our human connection to it. This is one of the magical things about drawing - it gives us almost visionary moments of connectedness.
Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We're reflections. It's a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.
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