David Salle famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.
-- David Salle

#Kids #Color #Drawing
To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke.
-- David Salle

#Narrative #Information #Sometimes
For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.
-- David Salle

#Art #Fall #Bed
What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.
-- David Salle

#Eyebrows #Comedian #Actors
People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent.
-- David Salle

#People #Looks #Remember
This is a little off subject, but I'm interested in those cases where someone is barking up the wrong tree, or misapplying their talent.
-- David Salle

#Tree #Littles #Talent
It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.
-- David Salle

#Ideas #Two #Differences
Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted a lot of time not being bold enough, or still engaged in the questioning that you get into at school.
-- David Salle

#Art #School #Thinking
Since I moved six or seven times the first year I was in New York, I had to be able to roll up the work, and paper would just get destroyed. Once I looked at what I'd done, I realized I had made a painting, sort of by default.
-- David Salle

#New York #Years #Firsts
My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.
-- David Salle

#Focus #Imagery
As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.
-- David Salle

#Running #Demand #Addresses
I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that.
-- David Salle

#Hair #Beverly Hills #Fancy
I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.
-- David Salle

#Feels
I did all the stuff that people do - film, performance, photography, pictures and words, words and pictures. In retrospect, I was trying to find some way to put things - meaning images and forms - together that highlighted some idea of what was underneath the surface of an image, what determined how something was seen.
-- David Salle

#Photography #Ideas #People
I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.
-- David Salle

#Art #Holiday #Years
My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World War II, but he was always a Sunday painter. At a certain point, he gave me his oil paints and I messed around with them, having no idea what I was doing.
-- David Salle

#Father #War #Sunday
Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often the time when it looks like anything but.
-- David Salle

#Successful #Style #Looks
Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.
-- David Salle

#Being In Love #Love Is #Thinking
Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.
-- David Salle

#Connections #Fluidity #Painting
If my work is pornography, so what? I don't have any moral compunction about pornography. Any feelings I have about it are purely stylistic... I don't see why it should be excluded as a serious subject.
-- David Salle

#Feelings #Serious #Moral
The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.
-- David Salle

#Done #Originality

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