James Rosenquist Quotes

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James Rosenquist

Profession : Artist

Birth : November 29, 1933

You live till you die, and that's the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive.

James Rosenquist

I was on a panel with Marshall McLuhan in Canada. Someone says, 'Mr. McLuhan, I read your book, and I disagree with you.' And he says, 'Oh, you read my book? Then you only know half the story.'

James Rosenquist

I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land': things that were a little out of style but hadn't reached the point of nostalgia.

James Rosenquist

Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

James Rosenquist

When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it's a good time to start painting.

James Rosenquist

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

James Rosenquist

I painted the Astor-Victoria sign seven times, and it's 395 feet wide and 58 feet high. I dropped a gallon of purple paint on Seventh Avenue and 47th Street from 15 stories up and didn't kill anybody. I dropped a brush at Columbus Circle. It fell on a guy's camel-hair coat.

James Rosenquist

If a person is insane or troubled, you first have to get the person to admit that they have a problem before you can solve anything.

James Rosenquist

I think of my actions every day: what seems to be important and what isn't.

James Rosenquist

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

James Rosenquist

Many young artists, they look at the art world and think they can make a lot of money.

James Rosenquist

The automobile crash was... devastating in ways that I still cannot really bear to think about... It took me many years to recover. In some ways, I never have.

James Rosenquist

The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.

James Rosenquist

There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!

James Rosenquist

Believe it or not, there were very few books on art, years ago.

James Rosenquist

The very, very beginning is that my mother and father were aviators.

James Rosenquist

I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.

James Rosenquist

I learned a lot of painting tricks painting outside.

James Rosenquist

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

James Rosenquist

I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.

James Rosenquist