Alain de Botton Quotes

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

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

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

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

Paint the essential character of things.

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

Basically, an artist should be a mirror, or a reflection of society or his or her environment. What you see is what you can articulate.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

Sometimes art imitates life.

And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.

Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.

I think, for an artist, when you're drawing somebody who actually exists, it's a much steeper critical curve, as there is an actual representation of that person out there. You can't just interpret it any way you want.