David Allee Quotes

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

You can disguise any set with lights and shadows.

For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings, I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.

Paint is the skin of a painting: it is fiction. In houses, it disguises the plumbing and wiring and studs and nails.

I'm obsessed with trompe l'oeil - the idea of something that is existing and is not existing.

Never believe your eyes

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

Pictures can be pretty deceptive.

Color deceives continuously.

Where there's smoke, there's bound to be mirrors.

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.

People think that they see, but they don't.

Funny, now I can see, how looks can be deceiving.

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.

The idea that I [should] trust my eyes more than the stats, I don't buy that because I've seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I know that the rabbit's not in there.

One illusion is as good as another.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

The assumption that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deception.