What inspires me to paint is life, my emotions, through my paintings I want people to understand that life isn't always happy but you should be always hopeful that's why I use bright colors in my paintings, that's what I want people to feel about me and when they see my art.

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I saw Frank Frazetta's art, and it seared on my memory. I love his paintings. They're so amazing.

"My Inspirational comes from many sources. Clearly, Mother Nature has always occupied an important position in this regard, which is tied up to my early experiences in Mexico. In addition, the patterns used in Mexican arts and crafts-ceramics, textiles, tiles, masks, etc.-also have been present in the development of my mental and artistic imaginary from the very beginning. Other elements that I can mention are indigenous myths and legends, the expressions of other artists from various cultures, iconic historical figures, and the works of poets and other writers, some of whom are my friends. Obviously, my surroundings are also a big source of Inspirational, as my series of paintings on the Pacific Northwest clearly show.

I've been strongly influenced, in technique as well as subject matter, by some of the early 20th-century book illustrators - Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac in particular, Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts-&-Crafts movement they engendered. I'm continually inspired by Rembrandt, Breughel (I've wondered whether his brilliant "Tower of Babel" had inspired Tolkien's description of Minas Tyrith), Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and Turner; it's not necessarily that they influence my work in any particular direction, more that their example raises my spirits, re-affirms my belief in the power of images to move and delight us, and shows me how much further I have to go, how much is possible. Having visited Venice and Florence for the first time, I am besotted with the Italian Renaissance artists - Botticelli, Bellini, da Vinci and others. Their work is calm, controlled, and yet each face and landscape contains such passion. In Botticelli's paintings, every pebble and every leaf is rendered with a religious devotion; there is reverence inherent in paying such close attention to every stone, turning painting itself into a form of worship, an act of prayer.

"There is no ready vocabulary to describe the ways in which artists become artists, no recognition that artists must learn to be who they are (even as they cannot help being who they are.) We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells to art?

Shogo. I know I'm repeating myself, but I have to say it. If I were Keiko, this is what I'd say. Please Live. Talk, think, act. And sometimes listen to music... Look at paintings at times to be moved. Laugh a lot, and at times, cry. And if you find a wonderful girl, then you go for her and love her.

Understand the difference between mystical art and mystical knowldge. Devotional music, life stories of mystics and Gods, images, paintings etc. may temporarily transport you to mystical world but they can't give you mystical powers. Art is beautiful. Knowledge is boring. Ancient sages tried to mix art with knowledge. We discarded the knowledge but kept the art.

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

There is truth in stories. There is truth in one of your paintings, boy, or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.

If you realize you are an artist, then start showing your paintings

I've learnt some Things. Like the way friendship can be just as intense, beautiful and endless as romance. Like the way there's love everywhere around me - there's love for my friends, there's love for my paintings, there's love for myself.

Why all these paintings of you? Because I'm an artist, Emma. These pictures are my heart. And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.

I get strength from my art - all the paintings I own are powerful.

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings I see only science.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.