Jim Dine Quotes
1977
[The immediacy of drawing attracts me.] I don’t mean the quickness of
drawing. I mean the fact that you can take your finger and make a drawing.
You don’t have to wait for things to dry. It’s a direct thing to
do. It seems to me to be a rather primary act…and it suits me.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
202.
1977
I just happen to like the look of the surface that’s been erased and
left. It’s…like a strata. I think it enriches the surface and ultimately,
if the drawing works at all, it will make it a richer drawing to look at. It’s
about the history of the drawing. I like to leave the history in.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
202.
1977
I’ve learned a lot by looking at Matisse drawings--over and over
again--and rejecting the things that I couldn’t do, because I’m
not him and obviously not French.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
202.
1979
When I start a drawing, I just look very hard and begin to make marks, and
then erase the marks, and build up this history of marks…I do know
that I never see a figure totally; I always see just a part of it. I try
to see
how it is put together. But I just make marks. I like to sully the paper,
to get into it and make a bit of a mess and get going.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
207.
1983
I love people’s tracks. I don’t want to be spared anything about
private life. I want all that history. I think it just makes it so much more
interesting and rich. And that’s what I try to do. I think drawing is
a kind of autobiography or biography. I think that the kind of drawing that
tells a lot is what I’m most interested in. I’m not, obviously,
a Minimalist and I’m not interested in that. I want to know everything.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
208.
1983
I’m very lonesome when I go into a studio that I haven’t been to
for a while and there’s only one thing. I like to surround myself with
my work. I’m much more comfortable with a lot of things and working
on them at once rather than one thing.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
209.
1983
I feel that my work always had a literary side--that is, it didn’t
refer specifically to books, but it had some sort of content other than formal
content, and it has had and does have, I feel, a narrative side…I’ve
been as moved by books as I have been by pictures.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
209.
1983
I used [the tools] because they felt right. They felt like relatives
of mine, as though their last name was Dine.
-- Dine in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York, 1985),
15.
2004
… I knew drawing was essential to me. It kept alive the need I had for
family. It gave me a line of tradition that led me back to artists I admired,
not just
Rembrandt and Picasso, Matisse and Degas, but others who are dismissed but
who gave their lives to drawing.
--
Dine in "Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)," in Judith
Brodie, Drawings of Jim Dine (Washington and Göttingen, 2004)
27.
2004
For me, drawing is all about looking--looking hard, seeing it, taking
it out, putting it back again to see if I can rebuild it better. I can imagine
that if I live two hundred years, I’ll still be correcting. It’s
the corrections that are interesting. They are the history of each drawing.
--
Dine in "Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)," in Judith
Brodie, Drawings of Jim Dine (Washington and Göttingen, 2004)
27.
2004
I am not erasing because I couldn’t get the object accurately, but because
I am hoping for grace to come to me I don’t think hard work makes a good
drawing….If I erase, it’s because I didn’t get what I wanted
the first time and if I don’t get it by the twentieth time let’s
say, and the paper is halfway gone, then I start to patch the paper….The
quest is to keep the thing alive--the drawing and the state of grace.
--
Dine in "Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)," in Judith
Brodie, Drawings of Jim Dine (Washington and Göttingen, 2004)
28.
2004
Drawing is not an exercise. Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and
going nowhere. Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey.
--
Dine in "Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)," in Judith
Brodie, Drawings of Jim Dine (Washington and Göttingen, 2004)
28.
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