Franz Marc Quotes

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

There are so many things in the world - in the cities - so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

There are different types of art, and you just have to follow where things take you. It helps me with my desire to perform live. That's something that a lot of actors and actresses don't get to experience on a regular basis.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

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

As soon as you are willing to say 'it's not for you', you're freed up to make art.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.