Peter Wright Quotes

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

Whenever I do someone's portrait, I'm trying to locate the photo in the lens while reaching into that person psychologically. There's the magic! I don't always achieve it. It's a hit or a miss!

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

I don't think we have reached a point where art really translates into science. Perhaps for some people, having good visuals can help translate into science.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I don't really look like people in films; I look like people in paintings.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.

I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.