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For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

David Salle

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David Salle
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: September 28
Drawer
Film Director
Painter
Photographer
Norman
Oklahoma
History
Fall
Art
Like
Feather
Catches
Feathers
Bed

More quotes by David Salle

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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
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Spend a day talking only in rhyme.
David Salle
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What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible it's not the end of the world.
David Salle
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Art is something someone made. It's a product of human endeavor. As such, it's not that different from having a conversation with someone. The painter is telling us something. Just, how do they - what's their syntax? What's their inflection?
David Salle
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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
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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
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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
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I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.
David Salle
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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
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My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.
David Salle
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The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.
David Salle
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The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.
David Salle
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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
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I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.
David Salle
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I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.
David Salle
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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