Chris Raschka Quotes

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.

I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

I couldn't do a record without knowing I'll translate it into something visual.

In a photo, you just do a click, but in art you have to put in so much energy. This concentration of energy and attention says something that other media cannot say.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.

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.

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.