Bridget Riley Quotes

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Make good art.

I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love, but I don't feel desperate. It's not about creating or building a career.

I have always tried to sublimate the body and to make people dream.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

You never know what an artist is going to create next.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

There can be no 'graduated exercises in drawing' leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

Oftentimes I feel like I can, through the music, paint a picture of something that I can't look anywhere and see in my real life.

I am a filmmaker. My job is to make films. When something excites you - a story or characterisation - you immediately forget about everything else. You only think how to make a movie out of it. The economics come only later. You shouldn't let money dictate the kind of films you should make.

The artist in me welcomes another opportunity to be creative.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes.

A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.

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.

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

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world.