Joe Bradley Quotes

Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.

When there's a painting in the room, my eye goes right to it. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a television on, you can't take your eyes off the television. Paintings have that effect on me. It's where my eye settles.

I think painting has that unique potential to project opposing viewpoints.

The era of television in which I grew up was much simpler than now. Its conventions were quite transparent and fun to think about. Who could ever remember the plot of those shows?

Painting has this ability to send the viewer [backward], but it's also this physical object in the room with you. It's always knocking you back into the present moment, which I find very pleasurable.

You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.

There are different kinds of concentration required to make a painting, different kinds of being present.

The thing is that the money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art. If you're painting goes for ten grand or a hundred grand, it doesn't make painting any easier. And it doesn't make the painting any better if it goes for a hundred grand.

A picture can be funny and also weep inducing. One cries for many reasons. The state of weeping, for me, is induced by recognition of a rarified level of integration - thinking about what must it have taken to reach that integration.

It's a funny semantic turn - when someone paints a landscape, no one says they "borrowed" it, only that they painted it.

I can only think of a handful of artists that can make a funny painting or a funny sculpture without it feeling coined in someway.

I'm not a planner. I should be more articulate about what the imagery means, but I don't have a good reason for it; it's just there.

I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years.

I remember looking at books when I was in high school, but I don't think I really stood in front of a genuine painting or sculpture until I was out of high school.

Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.

I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you're sort of entering into a shared space.

The internet might be a convenience, but it hasn't yet, for me, been a fundamental reordering. These things are supposed to be time-savers, so you have more time standing at your easel if you so choose.

There's something retro about the pop culture references in the paintings, so I'd imagine it's not as much a pop culture reference as a pop art reference.

I've had phases where the compass point seems lost. It can happen for various reasons, among them, that you're trying to do something outside your skill set; your skills have to catch up with the things you see in your head. But it's important to make all of those paintings, even the failed ones.

People weep at music all the time, because music gives form to some abstract level of integration.

Money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art.