I like to imagine that the Neanderthals were all really good artists.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.
I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.
I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.
I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
I'd photographed musicians before but this was different. Syd was very charismatic, and he had the aura of a poete maudit, which made him the perfect subject for me - I realised that rock n' rollers were the modern equivalent of all the poets I was so enamoured with.
Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.
I looked real Neanderthal. I could have been Mexican, I could have been black; I could have been anything.
I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.