Roy H. Williams Quotes

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

When a designer creates, he looks at the world around him.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

If I could bring 'The Tunnel' to life, I'd like to do it like that.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

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 what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don't know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

My process of working is that I don't create a picture, I find it.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

My painting does not come from the easel.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

The body, in 'La Belle Noiseuse,' was the source of the artist's creativity.

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

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.