Ryan McGinness Quotes

There's a whole range of sources of inspiration for the drawings and stories. They come from dreams, hallucinations, pop songs, or other things I see in the world around me.

My reason [for making my own paint] is to force a real-time experience of the work. Most work today is experienced by reproduction, and more specifically by computer screen, like jpegs, but an RGB simulation of fluorescent will never fully accurately depict some colors. For example, our eyes are a lot more sophisticated than you might assume. You can feel a lot more going on on the surface of a canvas than you can on the surface of a screen.

I don't take so-called "vacations" often. In fact vacations are more stressful than the lives my wife and I worked hard to set up for ourselves in New York. It seems like being on vacation is like normal living, which is not very satisfying. It means we're figuring out what to make for lunch today, and that seems like such an absurd way to live. The issue of dealing with that doesn't seem to be so prominent back home. It sounds so silly and ridiculous, but it's really the way it is. We love what we do, so I prefer being in the studio; that's really living for me.

I love drawing, whether it's considered work or not, but I'm always drawing, and that's the core of the work. Everything comes from drawing.