Richard MacDonald Quotes

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

There is no better exercise than to study and devour a picture, and then, without looking at it again, to attempt the next day to reproduce it.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

For some time it's been my habit to use images when preparing a speech: rather than write it down, I illustrate it.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

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

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

My memory of those places is better than my pictures. That's why I get much more satisfaction out of shooting thematic work that has to do with an idea that I'm searching for, or searching to express.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image.

I think I work much the same way I always have. I'm trying to interpret something emotionally visually. I'm reading the brief or article, or listening to the music, and deciding where that sends me, and what would it look like.

Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.

A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.

When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life.

Whenever I do someone's portrait, I'm trying to locate the photo in the lens while reaching into that person psychologically. There's the magic! I don't always achieve it. It's a hit or a miss!

If I could bring 'The Tunnel' to life, I'd like to do it like that.