Richard MacDonald Quotes

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

The artist is an interpreter of Nature. People learn to love Nature through pictures. To the artist, nothing is in vain; nothing beneath his notice. If he is great enough, he will exalt every subject which he treats.

I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.

I know that I am a singer and an actor, yet in order to give the public the impression that I am neither one nor the other, but the real man conceived by the author, I have to feel and to think as the man the author had in mind.

Music is an expression of individuality; it's how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there - express it - whether it's sculpture, dance or singing.

Then came the choreography... the impact of music and choreography tends to really emphasize an overall feeling of what you really want out of the program.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

Every time we do anything artistic, the way it's perceived is always going to be different from the way that we had intended it to be because it's subjective.

Being called a dance photographer makes me bristle. You might say that dance is my landscape. The root of my interest is movement or, rather, how movement can be interpreted photographically, and dance provides a perfect opportunity for this.

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.