James Rosenquist Quotes

James Rosenquist was one of the leading pop artists of the twentieth century. Along with contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein they used images from popular culture and turned them into fine art. Rosenquist used his background as a commercial artist who painted large billboard advertising images to create his big, bold and powerful pop art paintings. He produced paintings, drawings, prints and collage. Famous James Rosenquist paintings include “President Elect”, “I Love you with my Ford”, “F-111”, and “Star Thief”.

Mini biography: Born James Rosenquist on the 29th of November, 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, United States of America. His mother was Ruth and his father was Louis Rosenquist. Rosenquist was married twice and had two children: Lily and John Rosenquist. He married Mary Lou Adams (divorced in 1975) and Mimi Thompson. James Rosenquist died on the 31st of March, 2017 in New York City, New York, U.S.A. Rosenquist was 83 years old when he passed away.

Check out these books on James Rosenquist: “James Rosenquist: Visualizing the Sixties“, “James Rosenquist: His American Life“, and “James Rosenquist: The Big Paintings: Thirty Years“.

James Rosenquist Art Quotes

I was probably born with the ability to draw, but that does not make you an artist. James Rosenquist

I tell young people that the greatest paintings in museums are made with minerals mixed in oil smeared on cloth with the hair from the back of a pig’s ear. It’s that simple. James Rosenquist

If you are close to it, a big painting is just a feeling around you, that’s all. James Rosenquist

It all has meaning to me. As I explain my paintings, I hope that they get away from me, that the idea takes off and has a life of its own. James Rosenquist

Look at the difference between de Kooning and Rothko for instance, and Barnet Newman, and Franz Kline, and so forth. They’re all totally different personalities; same with Pop artists too. They’re quite different. The only thing that connected Pop artists was most Pop artists had been some kind of commercial artist. Roy had been was a draftsman. Oldenburg did cartoons. James Rosenquist

Have you ever watched anyone die? They are struggling for life and then they are dead and something seems to have left the room.. an electrical spark, a soul, I don’t know what it is, but there is a cadaver left, and the spark is gone. That’s very, very peculiar I think. James Rosenquist

People say I use my billboard technique to make art. Baloney! I used my art technique to paint billboards. James Rosenquist

Whatever you look at is dictated by what else comes in your eye, and it’s that color or not or whatever. And I encountered that a lot of times doing billboards in Times Square and everything else. Anyway, so I decided I wanted to do it for Leo Castelli. I wanted to do an all-around, wrap-around room painting, whatever. Whatever it looked like, I dictated it would look like that because of what came in the side of your eyes. James Rosenquist

Whenever I got a new studio I made the largest possible painting, and since the ceiling was low, the painting became horizontal. As I changed studios and got larger spaces, I made bigger paintings. James Rosenquist

I never used a brand name. I think the closest I came to doing something like that was when I painted a big dish of red Campbell’s noodle soup—way before I ever saw that Warhol did a soup can. It was called, In the Red, this big painting with part of female and male images in the big red tomato soup. James Rosenquist

To be creative is to be accepting, but it’s also to be harsh on one’s self. You just don’t paint colors for the silliness of it all. And maybe it has to be different, some new pictorial invention. There’s a meaning and an idea and many layers of vision in the same picture. James Rosenquist

I mean, artists are eccentric. Franz Kline used to make his lunch and eat lunch about midnight—he used to work all night. He was a night guy, totally night fellow. James Rosenquist

It’s all autobiographical, everything is, all of it. James Rosenquist

What I wanted to do was to take these images, anonymous images from advertising, place them in a picture plane, in a certain size and a certain scale—really well-painted fragments—and have the largest fragment the most close-up and the most anonymous because it was magnified so much. It would be like seeing an image, but you wouldn’t quite know what it is. So, people thought they were mysterious. These paintings had a mystery about them. “I know what that is.” But what is that? James Rosenquist

More on American Artist James Rosenquist

How has James Rosenquist influenced your art making? Is he one of your favorite pop artists? Let us know what you think about Rosenquist in the comments below.

For more on the famous American artist here’s three excellent James Rosenquist books: “James Rosenquist: Visualizing the Sixties“, “James Rosenquist: His American Life“, and “James Rosenquist: The Big Paintings: Thirty Years“.