“On a formal visual level, I’d say that about 85 percent of my work as an artist has been informed by my job as a graphic designer. People who don’t understand or don’t know about the history of graphic design – if they’re mainly art historians – might just look at my work and say “Constructivism”or “John Heartfield”. As someone who only went to art school for a year and a half, I didn’t know who Heartfield was until I curated a show at the Kitchen, New York, in 1980 and someone asked me why there was no Heartfield in it. Critics always focus on the fine art/Constructivism end of my work, rather than thinking that this was somebody who had a job, who had a training in cropping photographs and who pasted words over them. And those words, when you were in a layout department, didn’t say anything they just said, “A, B, C, D, E, F, G”. My job afterwards as an artist, in many ways, was to make that sort of device meaningful.

I don’t like to talk about my influences, but certainly they include 30 years of New York tabloid newspapers, plus the films of Sam Fuller, that black and white stuff.”

— Barbara Kruger (via)

“The main thing that I stress to my students is the separation of personal expression versus commercial art. I really think that you’re just set to get your heart broken if you go into commercial art trying to do your art there. Some people can and it’s natural for them, but you really have to serve people, and that’s the idea of it. When you do commercial illustration— and I’ve said this a billion times because someone said it to me when I was in college-you need to take your ego out and put it in a box to be a commercial artist. On the other side, you can be Captain Nemo, and you should be. I try and encourage my students just to stick with it because attrition must be gigantically huge for artists.”

— Gary Panter

“I believe ultimately that great education is self-education, especially in the arts. The students are not empty bottles waiting to be filled. They’re full. What is needed is to get the stuff out. An ideal education develops confidence, ego strength and a thirst to discover one’s possibilities. I think a good teacher doesn’t teach but creates an environment or climate where people learn.”

— Lou Danziger

“I look at a lot of art; the illustrators attracted me early on because I could understand what they were doing, making a picture of a pirate, whatever, I got that. But as I have gotten older my influences have become much more impressionistic, those that are more abstract. As a young artist at art school, Van Gogh didn’t necessarily do anything for me, but now those shapes and flat areas of color, those textures, they drive me crazy. Edward Hopper is the same kind of thing. It is something that was also in Frazetta, those bold, strong shapes. As I look at the piece on my drawing table right now, it is a relatively simple image of Hellboy against an old religious piece of art. But I’m going back into this and breaking it up into little shapes, almost turning it into a mosaic knowing that I’ll be able to say to my colorist: ‘Give me all these dots of another color.’ That’s a very impressionist, painterly technique. Currently, this is the way that my brain is working. I really dislike the whole slick airbrush approach, it just doesn’t gel with my work. If it ever worked! It certainly doesn’t anymore. Finding these ways to add a certain richness to the art by breaking it up into little shapes has all come from looking at these painters.”

— Mike Mignola