Raymond Pettibon Quotes

Art comes after the fact, as a witness to certain things that have happened.

Art can be a kind of therapeutic, or kind of a fantasy life, or wish fulfillment...o r creating this alternate universe. Art gives me the freedom to do that.

Forgiveness is the nature of my art in general. It's expressing love and compassion, the kinds of things that don't make sense in any other context other than emotive expression.

I don't want to express violence or anger or hate in my art. I want to express forgiveness.

It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.

My drawing came out of editorial-style cartoons. Music was one thing and art was another, and there weren't really any standards for my art. My work was just drawings. They weren't done with any aspirations of becoming a part of punk scene. They weren't about punk. They were just collections of drawings, some of which I xeroxed and sold.

There are lots of guns and action in my drawings, and part of that is just to make them more interesting. Because you can go through a whole film and it's mostly talking heads and little else until the action scenes, and they're usually violence or physical stuff. Same with baseball, or any sport. Except I find pitching and batting are visually very striking.

It's inevitable that everyone's first drawing they draw is much like their fingerprint. It's inescapable that one has an identifiable style. It's not a major issue with me, but I never wanted to have a distinctive signature style so much.

It's possible to do your best work at your highest level without competing. I'm not anticompetition, but at an individual level, it can be degrading for both sides. And it doesn't have to be that way. I've done pretty well at getting past that sort of thing, and it's a relief not to have the rancor.

There's always a latent or inferred image in my writing. And I can almost always assume if I do a drawing that it will eventually have text.

I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology. There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures. There's no reason to abide by them. I don't have any vested interest in it.

I don't drive often, because the parking makes it too much of a nuisance. And I could never go back to commuting or anything. I'd just get fed up with it.

No one can help me with my work. I think I do best when I am just left alone.

It's very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act.

I was very influenced by comics. The drawing style, definitely, I was interested in. My style of drawing is largely a comic style, but it's also much more obvious than comics.

Sometimes there's a vacuum that has to be covered.

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

I'm not God, but I'm working within my own means as an artist and a person, and I possibly have more power than God does, in whatever form he has, if he exists, because I can work without the overarching ambition of wanting to rule over everything. I can work just for the heck of it.

When I see a train, I want to take it in my arms.

It's an extreme to go from an artist like myself to a commercial artist with art directors looking over your shoulder, or any other knucklehead telling you what your art should look like.

I really don't see any influence of my work on any artists. But I do think I've had an influence on drawings' being shown. I've had an influence on the economics of it.

What social media has done - Facebook, Twitter - is show the audience. I don't have an audience. When I make my work, it just goes out into the ether. I have a thick skin and it just brings me down to earth, you know, to realize how out-there and far away and paltry the audience is that gets what I'm saying. It's depressing if I let it get to me. And it's the same with hanging a show, the way it's put up, like, three stories high and you can't read a single word.

In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.

Back in the '80s, a lot of the images I used were from TV or from films on TV.

Anyone living, especially your peers, is a threat. You're judging them, they're judging you. This sort of criticism is as close to human nature as you can get. That can be a good thing sometimes. Jealously, rancor, competition, those can be good things in art. But it mostly puts you in a dangerous and disadvantageous position, and one that just takes away from you so much.

I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction.

I don't make art with grandiose delusions. I do know there are limits to what art is capable of. That makes it all the more appealing to me. And I can do as I will whenever I choose.

In my time, we had little league and junior league or whatever - before that, there's the sandlot. Kids played baseball wherever you can make a space. We played tackle-football on the street. Now we play basketball in the studio. We have a hoop. But we also have a pitching machine.

I don't have extravagant tastes or expenses - like with cars, clothes, or whatever.

There are instances where lines in my work are borrowed or stolen from sources, mainly from books, or they become my own versions. A lot of the writing is my own, too. But if someone were to take each drawing and trace it back to its source, most of them could be traced back to a book or a text.

Most writers do similar things in their minds. It's how the mind works, basically.

I don't know if it's good to be stuck at one place. I'm probably too close to home on that. Because that can happen-where I'm not the best judge of my own work.

If you don't use an image now you might have a place to put it in further down the line - and I have a lot of unfinished drawings.

I don't feel that I decided deliberately I'm going to write something and have it stand alone. Somewhere by the end I think it would probably revert to imagery.

Whenever I reference something, it usually comes back at some point. I don't know why.

Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers.

I wouldn't want to be defined so much by comics or cartoons. My work is more narrative than that. If you take your basic cartoon, there's always a punchline or a joke at the end. My drawings don't depend on that so much.