Nathan Sawaya Quotes

Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

It's really amazing to stand in front of a work you haven't seen before and be almost overwhelmed by its beauty and the vision and execution of the artist.

I don't want people to look back at my matches and say, 'When you did that move, it was good, and I liked it because it was cool.' I want people to sort of remember a rush of images and the emotion that they felt when they saw it. That's when I think you have a real masterpiece in your hands.

Music is an intrinsic part of life; therefore, it is important to transport different forms of artistic expression, science, and mathematics into compositions.

Art has to be able to match life, to respond to the ever-changing forms of the world, to electrify the audience.

'Perfect Sense' is an extremely serious film, and I am an extremely serious film-maker who is trying to explore the medium in original and interesting ways.

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

The true artist is never afraid of anything - including the glories of the past.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

I'm an artist, and I like art that gets people talking, good or bad. Criticism is good, too.

In the study of the fine arts, they mutually assist each other.

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace

The quilt format is highly appropriate for repetition and serialization. Formal issues of balance and color, space and light in landscape are endlessly engaging. I try to use the medium to its maximum, pushing well beyond tradition.

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

’The Art of the Brick’ exhibition is accessible because it engages the child in all of us while simultaneously illuminating sophisticated and complex concepts. Everyone can relate to the medium since it is a toy that many children have at home. But my goal with this exhibition when it first debuted in 2007 was to elevate this simple plaything to a place it has never been before.

Art is continually working to take the crust of familiarity off everyday objects.

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.

What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.

When objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909, this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.

Grandeur . . . consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.

If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.