Sergei Eisenstein Quotes

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

My painting does not come from the easel.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Writing and Painting are the same for me.

A photo is a creation.

The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

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

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.

I don't deal in terminology, I deal with expressions: colors, shapes, tones, characteristics.

Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.

I have been told that some of my photographs maybe indicate that I am a painter.

Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

There are particular images that I like. Allegro is composed of a series of still life photographs that has been put to speed. There is so much care that has gone into the composition of the cinematography.