Sigmar Polke Quotes

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

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

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

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.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact