Laurie Simmons Quotes

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

It's so important to work with material you can really mold and milk and create and evolve.

When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.

I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.

It's really fun to just stretch out and not have any boundaries or just try something for the craft.

If I take enough pictures, I'm going to get a good one, and I know not to stop at a bad one.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.

Ghibli is about craftsmanship. They draw characters and put life in it.

There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.

As an artist, I want to explore as much as I can.

If I knew what the photograph was going to look like, I wouldn't bother taking it. It's the voyage of discovery that fascinates me.

All creation requires a scientific brain.

I like art, photography, film - all that creativity.

In films, we tend to come up with something new all the time. Challenges and experiments are new at every stage.

With photography, you've captured a moment time - it's that moment only - and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It's about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.

I'm completely in control of creating my photographs, and I'm not always in complete control of creating a character. It's more of a way to express myself than acting is, by far.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one!

It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavorful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repitition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time. . . . If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.