Chris Ofili Quotes
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The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.
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I've always set out to embrace all that I am.
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Trinidad was an opportunity to start all over again, to have another stab at it. The mystery and atmosphere of the place have entered my palette a lot more than I thought they would.
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I think visual seduction is really a lovely thing. To be able to look at something and feel you want to get closer and closer to it, and as you get closer to it, the more you drop your guard.
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I'm black, and it's a very important part of what I am. I'm not embarrassed about it.
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I don't quite know how the urban music category came about, but I suspect it had something to do with trying to maximise sales.
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I don't think I met anyone posh until I went to London.
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Moving to Trinidad was a great experiment. I never knew what it would do to my work or even if it would be accepted by people and not be seen as me just falling off the edge of the earth.
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I'm aware that success can overwhelm you. The perception of you can be elevated to such a status that it's not you any more.
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The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.
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I wouldn't say even that I'm a broadly political person. But on occasion, I have felt that I have no choice but to paint something with a strong moral stance.
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We all studied math, but we don't go around spewing numbers. Religion should be used in the appropriate way.
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The church is not made up of one person but a whole congregation, and they should be able to interact with art without being told what to think.
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I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.
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I believe in God, but I'm not dominated by it.
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There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically.
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I try to bring all that I am to my work and all that I experience. That includes how people react to the way I am - the prejudice and the celebrations.
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I was brought up a Catholic and was an altar boy.
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When I left the Royal College, I decided I would only make paintings that I would want to look at myself, that felt close to my life.
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Doubt is important because it suggests progress. Total certainty can mean there's no assessment of things. Doubt, if you don't panic, can allow newness to come in and challenge something that's an established mode.
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I really like the language of painting.
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There's a magic that comes from playing entirely to who you are. I've got my specialist subject - in the Mastermind sense - and I wouldn't change it, or who I am.
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When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.
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Love is a blissful state, but it's not a utopia.