Eric Fischl Quotes

Above and beyond drawing my creations, I try to incorporate some kind of message. I try not to end as merely a question but try to provide a conclusion within the work.

I do not make movies to send any message, but my treatment makes my viewers think on the subject.

I had become a film director because I thought I could express something in an artful way.

When you watch a Coen brothers movie, it is always so certain about what it is trying to portray. That is their strength. The minute they write a word, they know how it will look on-screen. They are very purposeful, with no kind of mistakes.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

When you make illustrations, you're supposed to have a subtext; you're not just communicating words - you're actually adding another story altogether.

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.

A film is not a vehicle to accuse, or to relay a specific message. If we reduce a film to this, we lose all hope for cinema to ignite a richer conversation.

Clarity is important. Part of what I'm trying to do with some of these pictures is eliminate as much of the potential, as many kind of readings as people might want to make, as possible.

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs?

The photo-journalist and the photo-poet are both important. The problem is to separate the major objectives of the various groups and not to attribute qualities and intentions where they do not belong.

There's also a lot of punch you get from doing an extreme closeup and have it just be that image with nothing around it. There's a clarity and precision and impact there that you sometimes lose if you put everything else in that background.

I feel like you have to make art because you have to make it. But the end result of it- that last stage- you have to show it to somebody else to hopefully get a rise or reaction out of them- [to see] if it’ll affect someone else.

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.

I am not by nature the kind of creator who is transgressive in order to be transgressive.