Kara Walker Quotes

I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Overall, everyone has been respectful of my boundaries and my morals as a Christian and an artist. Sometimes I'll go to photo shoots, and they'll pull out some stuff that I'm not comfortable wearing, and I just tell them 'no'. I'm very glad God made me a person who's not afraid to say what I think. I can just go, 'No, I'm not going to wear that!'

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy-the tone range isn't right and things like that-but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention.

These pictures possibly give rise to questions of political content or historical truth. Neither interests me in this instance. And although even my motivation for painting them is probably of no significance, I am trying to put a name to it here, as an articulation, parallel to the pictures, as it were, of my disquiet and of my opinion.

The aim of the painting is that the eye should find out what it likes.

In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.

We all think we have our personal favorites. But when I say, "People shouldn't steal - is it true?" Everyone in a room of, let's say, a thousand people all raise their hands and say, "That's true."

Don't compromise your principles.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Even if someone thinks there's a mistake I've made on the piano, to me it's not a mistake; it's how it's meant to be.

Photorealism says: to fool your eye. That isn't what I've been interested in doing.

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.

Has your drawing the meaning you saw in the model at first?

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

To convey in the print the feeling you experienced when you exposed your film – to walk out of the darkroom and say: ‘This is it, the equivalent of what I saw and felt!’. That’s what it’s all about.