Toyin Odutola Quotes

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.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.

When I make a picture, I make love.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

Because there is so little room for expression otherwise, a lot of people love cinema because they find it a way of expressing themselves.

I try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time, I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse, and my friends are a diverse group of people.

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, and feel pretty satisfied.

I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.

I think all Latino actors want to be storytellers first. I want to be an actor first, and then I want to be Latina.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

A picture is a poem without words.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like 'Midnight in Paris.' Nostalgia isn't so enticing.

I think making a movie is like drawing or creating an art piece. The artwork reflects part of your personality, but not all.

I make movies just as painters paint: I work where I can.

I remember seeing 'Snow White' and saying to my mother, 'Will there ever be a Chocolate Brown?' She said 'Probably. Why not?' I just never thought the first black princess would be me.

I'm not sure if being Chinese really helped, but I do think that if a non-Asian had written a book called 'Crazy Rich Asians,' they might not have been looked upon so kindly.