Graham Swift Quotes

I want to elevate the mundane.

I leave these speculations to others. It’s quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn’t have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find beauty.

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond

It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun.

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

I have been very fortunate to be a part of tours with other artists that have exposed me to new places that I've never been before. Once you discover something beautiful, you just want to keep coming back.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

I would like to say to people, open your eyes and find beauty where you normally don't expect it.

My 'work' is about seeing not about ideas.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

Taste is the feminine of genius.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.