Glenn Ligon Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Glenn Ligon's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Visual Artist Glenn Ligon's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 18 quotes on this page collected since 1960! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Glenn Ligon: more...
  • I said to myself, "If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one."

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • In government they learned their lesson. They don't trust artists anymore. Now the money has to go through arts organizations. But, yeah, back then you could get a grant, and I got $5,000 - a huge amount of money.

    Art   Artist  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas."

    Guy   Painting   Canvas  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.

    Lovely   Sensual   Looks  
  • At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.

    Uplifting   Mother   Art  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • 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.

    Giving   World   Kind  
  • Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • I love Thelonious Monk's song "Just a Gigolo." It's probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I'm mesmerized, because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.

    Song   Monk   Pop Music  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • I think there's an interest right now in the performance aspect of artworks, instead of just hanging things on walls. We're in a moment when a lot of younger artists are looking at work from the '60s and '70s - they are looking at the pieces by Marina Abramovic or Vito Acconci. These pieces have a time element. They were performed live. To perform them again now isn't simply an homage, because it's a different audience, a different moment.

    Wall   Artist   Thinking  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

    Light   Black   Would Be  
  • Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them; but I don't think that's crucial.

  • I graduated from Wesleyan University with a b.a. in art. I was really headed toward an architecture degree, but when I did the requirements for the major, I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings than in making buildings. I was more interested in the interactions that happened inside the structures. So I got an art degree as a default position.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.

  • Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • I switched up so that I could work 12-hour shifts at the firm on the weekends so I could have days free to paint. But it was almost like I had a secret life, because I wasn't showing any of my work. It was just in my house. In '89, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That's when I started to get into group shows. Suddenly I sort of "came out" as an artist.

    Art   Weekend   House  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • A key text for me is James Baldwin's essays. And, in particular, his essay Stranger in the Village. It's a text that I've used in a lot of paintings. The essay is from the mid-'50s, when he's moved to Switzerland to work on a novel, and he finds himself the only black man living in a tiny Swiss village. He even says, "They don't believe I'm American - black people come from Africa." The essay is not only about race relations, but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.

    Believe   Mean   Men  
    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
Page 1 of 1
We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 18 quotes from the Visual Artist Glenn Ligon, starting from 1960! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
Glenn Ligon quotes about: