David LaChapelle Quotes

A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.

When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

Color is everything. It's another piece of the visual language to express what you're trying to say.

The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Art is always an energy exchange.

More important than having a romance with the object that I'm drawing, is to have a romance with the mark that I am making.

Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs?

Art is a human act, a generous contribution, something that might not work, and it is intended to change the recipient for the better, often causing a connection to happen.