Mark Bradford Quotes

#1. If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.

Mark Bradford

#2. Generally, when I tell people I'm a painter, they ask me if I have a card: 'Yes, we'd like this room in this color.' I still might get cards that say 'Mark Bradford. Painter.'

Mark Bradford

#3. At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.

Mark Bradford

#4. The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.

Mark Bradford

#5. I just like artist-driven projects, but for artists themselves: artist spaces, artist mentor programs, and artists buying buildings and making lofts. Doing whatever we can do. Because at the end of the day, I really think that we as a community only have each other.

Mark Bradford

#6. I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain.

Arthur Bradford

#7. About the time I was 7, I got really into black-exploitation films, so I made my own Wonder Woman, but I made her black.

Mark Bradford

#8. My mom was an orphan, and there was never anybody to tell her what she could or couldn't do. At the core, she's probably an artist - an artist and a feminist.

Mark Bradford

#9. I'm kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.

Mark Bradford

#10. I am always in a state of Eunoia.

And I'm not in it just for the vowels.

Mark Bradford

#11. I always made stuff but never thought, I'm going to be an artist.

Mark Bradford

#12. My art practice is very detail-, labor- intensive and I think that that's a way of slowing myself down so that I can hear myself think. That quieter voice has sometimes the more interesting idea, if I can get to it.

Mark Bradford

#13. The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.

Mark Bradford

#14. Everyone finds the time to do the things the want to do.

Mark Bradford

#15. To me they were all equal, and without people a business was just a building.

Mark Bradford

#16. Everything I do has an underlying political question.

Mark Bradford

#17. I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.

Mark Bradford

#18. My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.

Mark Bradford

#19. I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.

Mark Bradford

#20. Life, work - it's all very organic and fluid, a laboratory. I always tell people: whatever your thing is, you just have to be in it. Jump in; you'll figure it out.

Mark Bradford

#21. That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.

Mark Bradford

#22. You either have to find a way to be really creative materially, or you better have a trust fund. And, last I checked, I didn't have a trust fund.

Mark Bradford

#23. I don't believe in blanket statements on race.

Mark Bradford

#24. The police pull up in back of my car and run my plates - they don't see you as you are; they see you through a racialized negative gaze. I think the best thing is not to internalize it too much, or it'll make you crazy because you know it's going to happen again.

Mark Bradford

#25. When you're as tall as I am, you have no public privacy. People are constantly coming up and talking to you. Constantly. You have one of two ways to go: you engage with people, or you become really bitter. I choose to engage.

Mark Bradford

#26. I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?

Mark Bradford

#27. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

Mark Bradford

#28. I never expected to run into a room and suddenly I belonged. I figured people who live on the fringes of society, they're more free. They can choose to visit anywhere; they don't belong to anywhere. It's like being without a nation, in a way.

Mark Bradford

#29. I fell through the holes in the educational system. But education is still a way to change a life.

Mark Bradford

#30. Everything is more interesting and complex in my mind.

Mark Bradford

#31. In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I'm constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It's above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.

Mark Bradford

#32. I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.

Mark Bradford

#33. I just follow the things I'm interested in. That's always guided me. If I'm interested in something, that's where I go.

Mark Bradford

#34. I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.

Mark Bradford

#35. In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.

Mark Bradford

#36. I can go to my own opening, and the security guard will tell me that I have to go to the security entrance.

Mark Bradford

#37. I have always been very intrigued by the outside of buildings. I can just walk down the street and be content with watching facades. I don't have to go inside.

Mark Bradford

#38. I am fully present wherever I am. Why bother being in a community or neighborhood and not being fully present? I think that's colonization. I'm not interested in that.

Mark Bradford

#39. I figure if you have one person that loves you, that's enough, growing up. You just need one person in your corner.

Mark Bradford

#40. I don't look at things in black and white. There are big gray areas. There's a lot of slippage.

Mark Bradford

#41. The freeways create economic and racial borders in Los Angeles. South of Interstate 10 is one group of people, west of the 10 another, and south of the 405 North yet another.

Mark Bradford

#42. The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.

Mark Bradford

#43. Tobacco and religious organisations.

Mark Bradford

#44. I don't know why so many artists talk about the mainstream's problems from the fringe. I think, unfortunately, it's almost like our education makes us too safe and terrified to step into the world.

Mark Bradford