Fulke Greville Quotes

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

Any view of things that is not strange, is false.

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?"

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event. So the dimensions of it will be seen differently by different people.

Interesting thing, these fellows never seem to get the idea of perspective-' The Bursar thought, or received the thought: that's because perspective is a lie. If I know a pond is round then why should I draw it oval? I will draw it round because round is true. Why should my brush lie to you just because my eye lies to me?

The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not be approved, and even if they are technically fine, this is no reason why they should offhand be judged to be correct, if their subject is lacking in the principles of reality carried out with no violations.

Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

What is seen and called the picture is what remains - an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear.

At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.