every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
I have a feeling a lot of artists' work got lost [because of AIDS]. Howard was fortunate because his family and friends supported him, but a chilling thing I remember was these guys at St. Vincent's [Hospital] who would call out for someone to listen to them, just for a moment. They were dying alone. Who knows what happened to their work? It's been a process to follow the thread to find out everything Howard did. It's getting over that shock.
Artists and creative workers - people who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of the way to do things. They haven't been contented with mediocrity. They haven't confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others do them, but always a little better. Few are those who see with their own eyesand feel with their own hearts.
Tis not your work, but Love's. Love, unperceived, A more ideal Artist he than all, Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes Darker than the darkest pansies, and that hair More black than ashbuds in the front of March.
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people's songs, you're asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it's a song they know very well.