Jessica Abel Quotes

Language is much closer to film than painting is.

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

With each of those projects I wasn't thinking about how the layout would really affect the story I was working on - it wasn't the content that was affecting the layout, it was, how I wanted to draw at that point in time.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

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.

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

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.

I can bring in all these different components, and I marry these components, and I let them get traversed by the viewer, who reorganizes them.

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.

You know, when people talk about filmmaking and the techniques of filmmaking, we use them all the time in network television news in order to make our stories simpler, tighter and more understandable to the general public.

Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled.

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.

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.

Making a film is a challenge.

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

I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than - shall we say? - fifty percent of the total, and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I'm watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they're painted, could be art. With music, you're a little bit limited, of course, because it's only audio.

The through line of the way I like to work, what makes me different, and what I like to do for every project - although they are completely different from each other - is I like to do a lot of research and create a unique landscape and unique soundscape for each movie.

The very formal, beautiful, composed order that I make with paint and color is freighted with objects, but like leaves falling from a tree onto a lawnmower below, the edges of this 'thing' have a certain serendipity.

Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.