Dana Schutz Quotations

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.

I think that's just part of how it is with making art. Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before, and everything is just... lame.

You just have to work really hard and throw everything into it. ... It's really hard to be an artist, and even if you do work really hard, there's no guarantee about anything. There's no advice you can give someone that things will somehow work out, but you can talk to people about how they can make art a big part of their life.

My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.

That's when I feel really excited about a painting. When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality.

I'm mostly drawn to narratives that are difficult for me to visualize.

I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

I just saw a clip of Maria Bamford. She has a comedy show that was filmed and performed from her bed - the whole thing supposedly takes place in her bedroom at her parents house in Duluth, MN. I thought it was great and really strange - to have a comedy special without having to leave your bed.

The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry. With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages.