Vincent Van Gogh Quotes

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

It is a task of art to express clear vision of reality.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

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.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

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

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, let's say, a tramp vomiting in the sewere. You know, and next door to the picture Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. C. W. Jones on the subway going to work. You know, any kind of picture. Just make a collage of pictures.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

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.

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?