A biography for James Rosenquisthasn’t been written yet.
“I am getting old, so I really don't like clocks.”
“When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it's a good time to start painting.”
“I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.”
“I painted the Astor-Victoria sign seven times, and it's 395 feet wide and 58 feet high. I dropped a gallon of purple paint on Seventh Avenue and 47th Street from 15 stories up and didn't kill anybody. I dropped a brush at Columbus Circle. It fell on a guy's camel-hair coat.”
“The very, very beginning is that my mother and father were aviators.”
“When I got my first loft, I still didn't know what I was going to paint... There were long stretches when I just sat there and thought without interruption.”
“Certainly I have made comments on American society with the various pictures and have done about nine antiwar paintings. But I did them because I was incorporating my feelings into my work.”
“Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.”
“I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land': things that were a little out of style but hadn't reached the point of nostalgia.”
“There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!”
“I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.”
“I travel a lot.”
“I started billboard painting in Minneapolis, and I went to General Outdoor Advertising, and I said, 'I could do that.' They said, 'Oh yeah... we can always use a good man around here.'”
“I'm interested in contemporary vision - the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing! Bang!”
“I can handle ups and downs.”
“The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.”
“The image is not important.”
“I was on a panel with Marshall McLuhan in Canada. Someone says, 'Mr. McLuhan, I read your book, and I disagree with you.' And he says, 'Oh, you read my book? Then you only know half the story.'”
“You live till you die, and that's the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive.”
“Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.”