John Berger Quotes

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

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

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

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.