Agnes Varda Quotes

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, let's say, a tramp vomiting in the sewere. You know, and next door to the picture Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. C. W. Jones on the subway going to work. You know, any kind of picture. Just make a collage of pictures.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

There is a world of communication which is not dependent on words. This is the world in which the artist operates and for him words can be dangerous unless they are examined in the light of the work. The communication is in the work and words are no substitute for this.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

As an artist you have the luxury of maybe presenting an issue in a certain way, as opposed to actually solving it.