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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.

Glenn Ligon

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Glenn Ligon
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: January 1
Conceptual Artist
Drawer
Filmmaker
Installation Artist
Painter
Photographer
Printmaker
Video Artist
Visual Artist
The Bronx
New York City
Turns
Point
Extraneous
Else
Abstraction
Everything
Text
Writing
Canvas
Work
Realized
Became
Painting

More quotes by Glenn Ligon

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It's a great idea: to feel the rhythm of something by seeing how it flows on a page.
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I said to myself, If the government thinks I'm an artist, I must be one.
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Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Like any artwork, things become richer if you know more about them but I don't think that's crucial.
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My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.
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