Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

Basically, an artist should be a mirror, or a reflection of society or his or her environment. What you see is what you can articulate.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

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

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

A comic can be aesthetically beautiful. I think they captured it beautifully and accurately.

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.

Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.

I think, for an artist, when you're drawing somebody who actually exists, it's a much steeper critical curve, as there is an actual representation of that person out there. You can't just interpret it any way you want.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.

The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.

Drawing is deception.

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.