Sam Abell Quotes

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing. Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

I always would dream of making music videos. Whenever I make music, I always have a visual in my mind. I always see things.

When I make music, it's a very visual thing. Conjures up a lot of images.

Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.

In front of the camera I look and I see visually what I've created.

No matter how fast I could do it with the digital camera I don't think I would get the same thing out of it. The passion I have for formulating an idea stands alone. It is the important essence of what I do.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

When I make music and I'm talking on records, it's like I'm painting a picture. In my mind, I'm seeing a film.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

I'm always building images. Even when I go out and put a look together, it's in my head the whole day, like, how I'm going to create this whole story. But I'm never satisfied; it's always a work in progress no matter what. Every day is working.

It is probably like an artist. They see in their head what they want to draw, and they draw it. It is like I have a feeling inside me that I want to create on a horse, and that is what I do.

When you are a designer, what's important is to be aware of things. Everything should lead to an idea, a line to follow, a movement.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

Things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them.

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.