Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.

I love nature, but I try to change it a little bit, not copy it.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.

What is seen and called the picture is what remains - an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

The originality of a subject is in its treatment.

When I initially read the script, it goes inside and comes out different things even without commenting on any stuff. And then, those pieces are taken out and then spread out through the movie.

There is creation in the eye.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.