Simon McBurney Quotes

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

I think there are a lot of pictures to make. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter. To me, the making of the pictures is the most important thing.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.

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

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.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Personally, I have had sometimes moments where I thought my idea behind the idea of a collection - the concept maybe - something that we don't see at the end on the catwalk, I think the way it was, the genesis in my mind, was probably artistic, an artistic approach.

Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

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

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

The style depends on the subject.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

Making art is different for everyone.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

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.