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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