Jose Parla Quotes

#1. I never want to abandon my roots. I want to give my past and the history of painting the importance it deserves, including the masters like Rembrandt, who built up the surface of the canvas with transparent layers.

Jose Parla

#2. I have too much energy, even for myself. I'm lucky to have something that focuses me.

Jose Parla

#3. You try to tap into a memory and you close your eyes and it comes back. So I was doing this in the painting and then that became a practice of mine. Sometimes it was a cathartic situation, a way to meditate.

Jose Parla

#4. My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.

Jose Parla

#5. I think artists should define themselves. They should speak about their work and how it relates to society and what's going on in the world.

Jose Parla

#6. As a young kid I was in love with breakdancing. I practiced the uprock style, which is a battle style of dance that looks like fighting. It comes from the gangs in New York in the 1960s and '70s. It's beautiful, almost like a martial art, and it can be funny, too, because you make fun of each other.

Jose Parla

#7. Sometimes I'm not so sure how healthy it is because it's exhausting to put all your emotion into your work, but I guess I should be thankful for that. I don't want the work to be about anything else but the truth and honesty.

Jose Parla

#8. The walls around us bear witness to lives past and present.

Jose Parla

#9. People have thought that some of my writing and lines are done by a machine. I'm able to move in a way that's part gestural dance performance, and it's fun for me, so I incorporate that into the painting.

Jose Parla

#10. If I'm going through something, I paint through it. It's very physical. I'm writing, I'm thinking, I'm meditating, I'm moving, I'm jumping off ladders, and it's therapeutic.

Jose Parla

#11. When I was young I was constantly reading walls; I took in everything written on walls, from love messages to political messages. It was my hobby and became my art.

Jose Parla

#12. Sometimes I'm inspired by a certain part of my life - I'm thinking about a place and I'll mix the colors from memory.

Jose Parla

#13. For me, the canvas is an abstract interpretation of a wall. It's a piece of art with its own history, one that alludes to the passage of time and to the theater of life.

Jose Parla