Andy Warhol: Doing

Andy Warhol was American artist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.

Andy Warhol: 266 quotes15 likes

“I really do live for the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more. I would rather either have it now or know I'll never have it so I don't have to think about it. That's why some days I wish I were very very old-looking so I wouldn't have to think about getting old-looking.”

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 7: Time

“Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.”

1975 - 1987
Source: Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1975, p. 178

“What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological 'For instance's. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn't apply to you, at least it was a documentary, it could apply to somebody you knew and it could clear up some questions you had about them.”

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 3: Senility

“When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, 'If you don’t think about it, it's right'. As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything.”

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 149

“I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.”

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 4: Beauty

“I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.”

As quoted in Pop Art, an Critical History, Steven Henry Madoff, Madoff, University of California Press, Berkeley 1997, p. 104
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“Edward Smith: Why is it more of a pleasure to do 30 or 40 pictures than to do just one?
Andy Warhol: Then I can, uh, listen to my soundabout which looks just like the thing that I'm wearing now, and you can listen to opera and stuff like that.
Edward Smith: Does that mean you don't have to think when you're painting?
Andy Warhol: No, you can listen to really good music.
Edward Smith: So, what, painting is an excuse to listen to really good music?
Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah.”

1975 - 1987, BBC interview (1981)

“The name [Pop] sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop. it's so funny, the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg, Neo-Dada for all those years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use, are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham too, I think.... History books are being rewritten all the time.”

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

“If an artist can't do anymore, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year of two from now [1963]. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen; that's going to be the whole new scene.”

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

“I guess it was the big plane crash picture [why Warhol started his 'Death'-series], the front page of a newspaper: '129 DIED'. I was also painting the Marilyns [the Marylin Monroe portraits, Warhol started after her tragic death in 1962] I realized that everything I was doing must have been death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and very time that you turned on the radio they said something like '4 millions are going to die'. That started it. But when you see I gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect.”

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

“The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”

'What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters', Part 1, G. R. Swenson, in Art News 62, November 1963
1963 - 1967