Wassily Kandinsky Quotes

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.

For an object under the eye will appear very different from the same object placed above it; in an inclosed space, very different from the same in an open space.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

Drawing teaches you to look at things properly and to understand form and structure.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

It's pretty far, but it doesn't seem like it.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

Most horses don't walk backwards voluntarily, because what they can't see doesn't exist.

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

Art isn't about drawing; it's about learning to see. What organization doesn't need this ability?

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

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

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it.

I can only draw what I see.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

I use visual perception as a way of bringing people into my space.

The young man should first learn perspective, then the proportions of objects. Next, copy work after the hand of a good master, to gain the habit of drawing parts of the body well; and then to work from nature, to confirm the lessons learned.

The experienced physician, mechanic, or physiologist looking at a wound, an engine, a microscopic preparation, "sees" things the novice does not see. If both, experts and laymen, were asked to make exact copies of what they see, their drawings would be quite different.