Hands that gripped paintbrushes, pens and drum sticks; eyes that saw new meaning in the familiar; feet that leaped across stages, stood before microphones or tapped underneath desks as their resolute owners wrote. By expressing themselves, the many creative people who died this year helped us better understand ourselves. Here is a tribute to some of them, in their voices.
“You can’t let people you don’t know decide who you are.”
— Nikki Giovanni, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)
“The time onstage is easier than the rest of one’s existence. At least for those two and a half hours, you can be quite sure who you are.”
— Maggie Smith, actress, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)
“When I learned how to talk, the best advice my teacher gave me was: Don’t listen to yourself. Don’t listen to the tones you make, because you might be impressed by it. If you start listening to yourself, nobody else will.”
— James Earl Jones, actor, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)
“I’ve never in my life, ever done music for money or fame. Never. And never will, because God walks out of the room then.”
— Quincy Jones, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)
“I dreamed a lot when I was a child. I’d be sitting at the dinner table, and suddenly I’d just go into this staring thing. And my parents would go, ‘Shelley, Shelley — hey!’ I wouldn’t snap out of it until somebody shook me or spoke very loudly. But I just had a lot to think about. There’s a lot to dream.”
— Shelley Duvall, actress, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)
“Art is a little like the dreams of a society.”
— Maurizio Pollini, musician, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)
“You can’t fall in love with your work.”
— Hinton Battle, dancer, singer and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)
“I’ve always felt that I and many of the people I admire are figments of our own imagination.”
— Kris Kristofferson, musician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“It’s all about vision. Inner vision. I don’t typically work from the outside world.”
— Bill Viola, artist, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)
“I had to learn the hard way that I wasn’t a whole person away from the theater.”
— Glynis Johns, actress, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)
“I do most of my writing at night. You don’t get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you’re writing about, rather than into the world you’re in.”
— Caleb Carr, writer, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)
“At night, which is when I like to work, I like to think I have conversations with Goya. He died so many years ago, of course, but somehow, his ghost is always with me.”
— Rebecca Horn, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)
“I try to be in the present but also share the past.”
— Ella Jenkins, musician, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)
“My art will never just be about personal stuff. I can’t set material to music if it doesn’t have some measure of social relevance.”
— Aribert Reimann, composer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“That’s a good feeling, to know that some stranger, sitting there in some remote town somewhere, laughed to the point that he forgot his ongoing miseries, or problems, and said to his family, ‘Hey, John Amos is on, come in here and let’s get a laugh.’”
— John Amos, actor, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)
“I just want to be a great role model for kids.”
— Michaela DePrince, dancer, born 1995 (Read the obituary.)
“You’re of selfless service to an audience.”
— Louis Gossett Jr., actor, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“I wanted to create art that made people stop and look. You’ve got to get ’em and hold ’em: The more they look, the more they see.”
— Faith Ringgold, artist, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)
“You can’t ever question what you’re doing, or the audience will sense you’re holding back. We’re all just a bunch of exposed wires out there.”
— Chita Rivera, actress, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)
“For me, the camera’s either a voyeur or a lover.”
— Donald Sutherland, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)
“Never give what the public asks. You must give the public what it needs.”
— Peter Eotvos, composer, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)
“I seem not to want to send the audience home unhappy.”
— Christopher Durang, playwright, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)
“I write all year, and at the end of the year I put an album out. And if sucks, it sucks, and if it’s good, it’s good. I just let it lay where it lays.”
— Toby Keith, musician, born 1961 (Read the obituary.)
“Creativity is not tied to any place and time — it comes when it comes, and I’m just grateful when it does.”
— Phil Lesh, musician, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)
“Music is in time, but you shouldn’t stop and find out, because then you lose the time, because time doesn’t exist.”
— Leif Segerstam, composer and conductor, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)
“One cannot ask more of one’s portion of history than to be there when it happens.”
— Arlene Croce, writer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)
“We have this endless well within us, and it’s just about continuing to dig in that well for the strength to face adversity — and so that we can also see all the beauty.”
— Shannen Doherty, actress, born 1971 (Read the obituary.)
“Keep on working, and tell yourself that you are a better artist than anyone else.”
— Alice Mackler, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)
“I’ve never thought of myself as a victim and never will.”
— Teri Garr, actress, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)
“When I returned to Vietnam to live in the mid-1990s, collecting and learning the cultural histories that are embedded in the objects I found was a way of reclaiming my heritage, my identity. If you know a history, you own it.”
— Dinh Q. Le, artist, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)
“As much as I have a tremendous amount of negativity about humanity and lots of self deprecation, I am truly grateful. That’s in the mix somewhere. I don’t let it come out too much onstage because I’ll disappoint the audience.”
— Richard Lewis, actor and comic, born 1947 (Read the obituary.)
“Most satirists make fun of what they like, not what they don’t like.”
— Peter Schickele, composer and satirist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)
“I like a little opposition. It makes me come up to the mark.”
— Helen Gallagher, actress, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)
“I like to leave room for accidents and chaos.”
— Steve Albini, musician, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)
“Sometimes the mistakes are the ones that get you the gig.”
— Carl Weathers, actor, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)
“I want to write about something that would apply to any time because it’s a state of the soul.”
— Edna O’Brien, writer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)
“If I work on a piece where the outcome seems knowable, I stop.”
— Richard Serra, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)
“I’m not saying I embrace everything that comes along. But it’s more in my nature to say yes to something new.”
— Sergio Mendes, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)
“I call myself a talented amateur.”
— Gary Indiana, writer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)
“You have to spend years and years learning and learning. And then you have to forget you’ve learned anything.”
— María Benítez, dancer, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)
“I am constantly trying to soothe that little wounded dude inside me to say, ‘You’re OK, even if somebody has made you feel shame.’”
— Gavin Creel, actor, born 1976 (Read the obituary.)
“I’m not a drummer that has chops continuously all the time. I never could do that. I’m not interested. I paint pictures. I tell stories.”
— Roy Haynes, musician, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)
“I’d rather be known for being a nice guy than anything else.”
— Liam Payne, singer, born 1993 (Read the obituary.)
“Keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”
— Paul Auster, writer, born 1947 (Read the obituary.)
“I am my own medium.”
— Steve Paxton, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)
“Your style is like your face: After a while you don’t really know what it is anymore.”
— Joan Acocella, writer, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)
“I don’t want people to read my work. I want them to be in the presence of it and to look at it almost with a dumb eye.”
— Lucas Samaras, artist, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“I was never the class clown. I was never the guy in the center stage with a lampshade on his head. I was a guy in the group, and I’d say something to the guy next to me, and he would laugh, and the guy next to him would say, ‘What’d he say?’ And then he would laugh. And maybe that’s what I’m still doing.”
— Bob Newhart, actor and comic, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)
“I drew as soon as I could clutch a crayon in my little fist.”
— Trina Robbins, cartoonist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)
“After I had written about a novel’s worth of bad pages, I understood that while I was not doing it well, that was the thing I was going to do. I don’t remember that realization coming as a swoop of insight, or as an exhilarating experience, but as a kind of absolute recognition that for well or for ill, that was the way I was going to spend my life.”
— John Barth, writer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)
“Artists somehow stumble onto the best life in the world, and I have no complaints.”
— Gena Rowlands, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)
“I think each one of us is a walking encyclopedia of all the sounds we’ve ever heard in our lives.”
— Alice Parker, composer, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)
“A musician’s special flavor comes out with age.”
— Seiji Ozawa, conductor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)
“You’re just lucky to be conscious for a limited amount of time, and what you’re able to do with your consciousness is up to you. You don’t win anything. There’s nothing to win.”
— Frank Stella, artist, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)
“I don’t think of myself as a leader. I am, but I don’t think of myself that way. I’m not trying to belittle what I do, but I think of myself as a dancer first. I’ll always be a dancer. Even if I can’t dance in front of you, I’ll always be dancing.”
— Judith Jamison, dancer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)
The post Artists We Lost in 2024, in Their Words appeared first on New York Times.
