Marc Chagall Quotes

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

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.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.

I am always surprised at all the things people read into my photos, but it also amuse me. That may be because I have nothing specific in mind when I'm working. My intentions are neither feminist nor political. I try to put double or multiple meanings into my photos, which might give rise to a greater variety of interpretations.

There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Many works of the past complete what they announce they are going to do, to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions. I can tell at a glance what Fabritius is doing, but I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrandt was up to.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

It's always funny to me how your movie becomes no longer yours and people interpret it how they want and react how they want to react to it, and it's fun to kind of watch that happen.

Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting.