Michael C. McMillen Quotes - Page 2

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• Being an artist is two things. You accumulate experience and time, and if you have something that's interesting, you have to be persistent. That's very important. There's nothing instant about it. It's a way of life, actually, where you choose to spend your life doing this activity called making art.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Interesting, Important

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Making art can be maddening at times and frustrating and not always rewarding, frequently not rewarding. But you do it because you believe in it and you do it as a passion that drives you, and it sustains you during those lean times.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Believe, Passion

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I don't refer to myself as a sculptor, but I use the word "visual artist." I prefer that, because that leaves the medium wide open because I've got ideas for film and video, things I haven't had the time yet to really fully explore, probably never will, but I want to be able to have that option open to kind of do that.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Artist, Kind, Film

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• One nice thing about L.A. is that you can work here in privacy, but that also works against you because you can get forgotten here, too. I think in New York, it's hard to be left alone. It's hard to have privacy whereas here, you can have it.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Nice, Thinking, Privacy

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I don't keep up with the art world. It's out there and if I did that too much, I wouldn't get my own work done. So I look at it every so often, "Oh, yeah, oh, okay," and go back to work. Life isn't that long. You got to do what you can when you have it.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Long, Done

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I love the idea of carrying on some kind of tradition using some of the artifacts from people that touched my life. They're a continuum, too. I still use my father's tools and some of my grandfather's tools. There's a very romantic streak in me. I confess, I'm a romantic, but I like the idea.

  Michael C. McMillen

  People, Kind, Tradition

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I don't need to control the mind of my viewer. Now this might sound contradictory because I want to make these installations set up an environment that will produce a certain kind of experience in the viewer, but beyond a certain point, I take hands off and leave it up to chance and personal experience. So maybe it's a marriage of control and no control we're talking about where the artist produces the artifact or the environment and then walks away from it, and the second half of the equation is the viewer and their personal history and how they feel about what they're experiencing.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Artist, Mind, Chance

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I want to create objects that will stimulate the viewer in ways that I am stimulated by these objects. Now that's an ideal situation and the artist has no control over what his audience is going to think, but they can try to communicate some quality, some poetry through the work and just hope that the viewer has something in the vicinity of a similar experience.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Thinking, Artist, Trying

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I can't make things I don't feel passionately about. I've never been able to. Years ago when I was going through college, I was trying to earn some extra money by making motel paintings and it was the hardest work I've ever done in my life, psychically. It was just torture.

  Michael C. McMillen

  College, Trying, Done

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• You see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Reality, People, Interesting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• That's what I like about the idea of the aesthetic experience, the idea of both enjoying looking at works of art and how they kind of talk to you, and also the process of making art, getting back to that idea of the aesthetic experience of making art is very important, It's another way of thinking. Instead of just using your brain, you're using your hands to think with. They're different connections, the brain that comes through the fingertips as opposed that comes through the eyes and ears.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Eye, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• The idea of getting old and dying, falling apart, does not sound fun at all to me, but it's an observation that I'm sure I'm not the first one to express. There're thousands of year of history attest to the same thing. Maybe it's the way I'm personally dealing with that inevitable transition. So I'm making metaphors out of the work possibly to think about that and try to get comfortable with the idea.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Fun, Fall, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• I think we all have a tendency to have things. Even, I've noticed, people on the street collect things. So I think there's some kind of human impulse to collect. That's why they build museums, I guess.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Thinking, People, Kind

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

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