Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

At a certain time, an artist needs a big retrospective. At other times, they need a more focused exhibition. It's a different story each time; it's about establishing a dialogue.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Art - be it painting, sculpture, music - they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

Life and art are inseparable.

I think art, at its best, happens on a conscious and a subconscious level.

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

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.