I'm not God, but I'm working within my own means as an artist and a person, and I possibly have more power than God does, in whatever form he has, if he exists, because I can work without the overarching ambition of wanting to rule over everything. I can work just for the heck of it.

Raymond Pettibon

Categorized in : Mean Ambition Artist

I don't want to express violence or anger or hate in my art. I want to express forgiveness.

Raymond Pettibon

hate want art

Forgiveness is the nature of my art in general. It's expressing love and compassion, the kinds of things that don't make sense in any other context other than emotive expression.

Raymond Pettibon

compassion expression art

Art comes after the fact, as a witness to certain things that have happened.

Raymond Pettibon

certain facts art

Art can be a kind of therapeutic, or kind of a fantasy life, or wish fulfillment...o r creating this alternate universe. Art gives me the freedom to do that.

Raymond Pettibon

creating giving art

It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.

Raymond Pettibon

drawing goal art

My drawing came out of editorial-style cartoons. Music was one thing and art was another, and there weren't really any standards for my art. My work was just drawings. They weren't done with any aspirations of becoming a part of punk scene. They weren't about punk. They were just collections of drawings, some of which I xeroxed and sold.

Raymond Pettibon

style drawing art

It's inevitable that everyone's first drawing they draw is much like their fingerprint. It's inescapable that one has an identifiable style. It's not a major issue with me, but I never wanted to have a distinctive signature style so much.

Raymond Pettibon

issues style drawing

There are lots of guns and action in my drawings, and part of that is just to make them more interesting. Because you can go through a whole film and it's mostly talking heads and little else until the action scenes, and they're usually violence or physical stuff. Same with baseball, or any sport. Except I find pitching and batting are visually very striking.

Raymond Pettibon

gun baseball sports

It's possible to do your best work at your highest level without competing. I'm not anticompetition, but at an individual level, it can be degrading for both sides. And it doesn't have to be that way. I've done pretty well at getting past that sort of thing, and it's a relief not to have the rancor.

Raymond Pettibon

sides way past

Sometimes there's a vacuum that has to be covered.

Raymond Pettibon

sometimes

There's always a latent or inferred image in my writing. And I can almost always assume if I do a drawing that it will eventually have text.

Raymond Pettibon

assuming drawing writing

When I see a train, I want to take it in my arms.

Raymond Pettibon

arms train want

What social media has done - Facebook, Twitter - is show the audience. I don't have an audience. When I make my work, it just goes out into the ether. I have a thick skin and it just brings me down to earth, you know, to realize how out-there and far away and paltry the audience is that gets what I'm saying. It's depressing if I let it get to me. And it's the same with hanging a show, the way it's put up, like, three stories high and you can't read a single word.

Raymond Pettibon

depressing skins done

I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology. There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures. There's no reason to abide by them. I don't have any vested interest in it.

Raymond Pettibon

apology mean art

I don't drive often, because the parking makes it too much of a nuisance. And I could never go back to commuting or anything. I'd just get fed up with it.

Raymond Pettibon

nuisance feds too-much

No one can help me with my work. I think I do best when I am just left alone.

Raymond Pettibon

help-me helping thinking

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

Raymond Pettibon

creative writing past

It's very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act.

Raymond Pettibon

svengali rasputin death-penalty

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

Raymond Pettibon

ink ideas art

In communist Russia, their major organ was Pravda, which means "truth." The Russians knew how to read between the lines. They didn't take their literature literally.

Raymond Pettibon

read-between-the-lines russia mean