John Berger Quotes

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

I don't think we have reached a point where art really translates into science. Perhaps for some people, having good visuals can help translate into science.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

If you can talk about it, why paint it?

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

Being so pathetic, I don't read. I just ... do things - writing out interviews you can't read, on pictures of footprints and things like that. I kind of like the idea of nailing the thing down and not really showing too much about it. There's just so much you can take for collage nowadays.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.