Norman McLaren Quotes

I like form and shape and strength in pictures.

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.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

Design, whether it's on your body or in your home, is the same thing. It's mixing different colors, different textures, and unexpected patterns - elements that you wouldn't often put together in an interesting way.

A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.

It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.

In things to be seen at once, much variety makes confusion, another vice of beauty. In things that are not seen at once, and have no respect one to another, great variety is commendable, provided this variety transgress not the rules of optics and geometry.

The principle of the design - the harmony, rhythm and balance are all the same with interior and fashion design.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

Every form is a base for colour, every colour is the attribute of a form.

By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives.

I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.

Unless it's done superbly, as in the Japanese film Gate of Hell, color can be a very distracting element.

If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.

I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.

Graphic Design, which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups, is not good design if it is irrelevant.

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.

The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

The substance of painting is light.

Dimension regulated the general scale of the work, so that the parts may all tell and be effective.

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