Nathan Sawaya Quotes

When I look at someone's face, there's something in my brain that just clicks - that breaks down their face into the elements that go into a caricature. It might be like the way a chef tastes a dish and can break down into elements what went into it.

I've always been fascinated by Picasso and how he would look at a single image through multiple perspectives and from separate moments in time. He would look at a woman's face and he would see almost a three-dimensional look even though it was a flat canvas. I thought, well why couldn't we do the same thing with a football play?

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind while doing something unrelated. You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

The exciting thing about doing art for someone else's story is how I can translate their world through pictures, and that's always a pretty big challenge.

Because of the many dimensions of forms of though which you can also put into physical form, you have the possibility to create much which we cannot fashion in the same manner.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

I love illustrating for other writers because I am given stories I never would have thought of, and my work as an illustrator is always in support of the story.

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.

Then I sit down, work at it, because now I have a convincing feeling about what that place wants to be, you see? And it's not just me. Me and my talent comes in taking that consensus and then making something wonderful out of it - a work of art.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

There's a fun, nostalgic aspect to Legos - people connect to the art on a different level. But it's also a medium that lets me design anything I can imagine. I especially enjoy creating curvy forms using rectangular pieces. Up close, you notice the sharp angles, but when you back away, the corners blend into curves.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Indeed, I would feel that an appreciation of the arts in a conscious, disciplined way might help one to do science better.

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

I do hear from people at my exhibition about seeing these things made from this toy from their childhood, and it brings them back. They'll go and buy a set of Lego from the gift shop because of that nostalgia and seeing it at the art exhibition.