I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.
David SalleWhat most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.
David SalleThe pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.
David SalleI was actually dumbfounded by how some artists talked to each other. For example, it was a normal night at a bar, nothing very momentous, when in walked a painter. The other painters at the bar had a bit of an attitude about it. One said to him, "You know, I'm tired of that feeling of hot air coming out from behind your work." And I thought, "Well, that's interesting." I didn't know you could even think something like that, let alone say it right to someone's face.
David SalleI feel very fortunate to have known James Salter, not very well, but I knew him over the years. Always, people would be talking, talking, talking, and after digging themselves into a deep enough hole, they would turn to Jim and wait for him to utter the single clarifying sentence.
David SalleI feel like it's not so much a tradition as a system that has been codified over the centuries starting in the Renaissance that applies to any painted surface. So if you're engaging in paintings, this is the language that one has to learn and is obliged to speak. I was very fortunate that I learned this language when I was a kid before I went to California, where I learned the language of attitude. Somehow the two things began to coexist.
David Salle