Oscar Wilde Quotes

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want.

As artists, we can't help but infuse our art with our own experience, so your experience becomes informative.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.

People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics - technical things instead of feeling.

Part of the reason I make things realistic is, I don’t really want to have to explain my work. What I wish to communicate is done so people can make their own interpretation, and if it’s different to my idea it doesn't matter.

Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

The artist has to transcend a subject, or he loses the battle. The subject wins.

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.