Kara Walker Quotes

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

Visual storytelling utilizes both language and art to pass on the essence of who we are.

Telling stories with visuals is an ancient art. We've been drawing pictures on cave walls for centuries. It's like what they say about the perfect picture book. The art and the text stand alone, but together, they create something even better. Kids who need to can grab onto those graphic elements and find their way into the story.

Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?

The compulsion to do the opposite of what you are told does not lend itself to many occupations outside the entertainment industry. Within the industry, it is unlikely that you will be very successful without it.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

A sketch is just a mini movie.

I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.

For me, the drive is storytelling. To be a part of an art that tells a story and to be a catalyst, a color in that, is very exciting.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

I don't want to just be in the normal kind of teen movie.

I so never went through a bad-girl period.

A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

Film is a window to the real world but a lie that makes you believe the unbelievable.

How I draw and how I leave things out is parallel in some ways to the non-verbal soundscape in radio stories.

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.

I'm interested in illustration in all its forms. Not only in books for children but in posters, prints and performance as a way of drawing people into books and stories.

I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.

Every day I run into people who don't know what I do. And even after I explain it they still don't know what I do. So now I can just say, 'Pick up the Locas book!' And that tells them all.

I was the punk outsider who nobody messed with. I was fearless. At 16, I graduated and moved out.