Paul Rand Quotes

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other.

I look at graphic design as communication, meaning that the work has to have a vibe to connect to the viewer or perceiver. I make a black and white drawing and then add color digitally, bringing in a contemporary pattern to the composition to create a vibrance.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

I think there is a debate in the arts about, you know, whether we must strive for art for art's sake, and you know, kind of try to keep political debate out of our work. And to that I say, I'd like you to show me an example of, you know, this so-called apolitical art. I don't think there's any such thing.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.

As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

Anything written or printed under a print or picture takes the attention from it and, if it is very black or white in any marked degree, will utterly destroy its beauty.

I'm not making music to get played in a club.

I love a well composed shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful, but it must be well composed.

In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something - it's the whole experience.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.