Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Allen Haringwas an American artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s by expressing concepts of birth, death, sexuality, and war. Haring's work was often heavily political and his imagery has become a widely recognized visual language of the 20th century...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPop Artist
Date of Birth4 May 1958
CityReading, PA
CountryUnited States of America
See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.
Nothing is important... so everything is important.
Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well.... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.
When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.
If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.
Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.
Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed, and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.
Children know something that most people have forgotten.
I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something...
The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.
Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don't do it for anyone else.
The dripping... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, its a natural part in the evolution of the work.
Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it...
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.