Barbara Hepworth Quotes

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

I have a visual imagination.

The real magic is in making the intangible idea, the creative impulse, manifest and live in our reality.

I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

Usually I'm able to imagine something and it comes out as I imagined, more or less.

I always see these landscapes in my dreams, and feel happy. I desperately try to transform these dreams into artwork, so that even while napping, I construct and reconstruct various images.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

The moment that you start to read a script, you're watching the movie in your mind, and that's the one moment that you have. Then, you go off to make the movie and you become so lost in it.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.

I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

My analysis of the situation was that Roman Polanski wasn't trying to break us down or get a performance out of us by destroying us. He was absolutely, very simply, trying to recreate this clear picture in his head. And the pictures he creates are absolutely perfect, and they are exactly what he saw in his head.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.

Music is very transporting. I'll hear a song for the first time and I rarely listen to the lyrics. I picture that song playing as a soundtrack to a movie, or even just in the background of someone's life. This all sounds weird, but I have an active imagination, and music opens the floodgates of that area of my brain.

I've always written songs with a visual counterpart in my mind that no one else can see.

Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming.