Melvin Van Peebles Quotes

I just make films that attract me.

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

Being in the studio, it's more of a controlled environment, where you can be Salvador Dali and sit back and look at the painting. And you can go, 'Ah, you know what? Maybe a little bit more red over here...maybe add some blue over here.' You can sit back and look at the painting.

I was being an artist, being sensitive and technical as artists are. I'm sure Leonardo Da Vinci did that. Artists don't always feel the same as others feel about their work.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Art has definitely influenced how I think of design, both as individual items and as a body of work.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

It's entertaining to watch somebody break my music down or explain what he thinks I was thinking during the process of making these records. Because... he has no idea.

I will preach with my brush.

It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.

When a designer creates, he looks at the world around him.

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

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

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

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.