Henry Selick Quotes

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

I used to find great difficulty in drawing feet.

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

As actors, we are expected to come up with an exaggerated performance, which is far from reality.

Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.

I really like Braun Strowman. I would turn the volume down on him just a little bit. I think he is a little bit overly animated, and he doesn't have to be. He is already a larger than life character when he wakes up and has a cup of coffee.

The truth is, I don't know how to draw.

When you're drawing from observation and experience, whether you intend to or not, you'll create a more relatable cartoon.

Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.

All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Why do you like primitive art? Because there is beauty in the deformity. Sometimes paintings that people consider realistic are not at all. Raphael figures look realistic, but in real life, they were deformed.

The New Gods really need to be larger than life. There's an operatic quality to them, and they need to be handled pretty carefully, or else you'll go too far and be almost like a caricature.

I think I am generally prone to exaggerating characters, taking them to a ridiculous extent. But you do also meet those people in real life who are just really awful.

Beauty has became a pejorative word in art. It was not something one should aspire to, because it was pedestrian. Beautiful things became cheap and easy. If it's cheap and easy, then upper classes aren't going to aspire to it. So, they have to find something more esoteric. I wanted the paintings to be realistic enough that you would have the ability to forget that I'm showing them to you.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads.

You just have to get one misstep - that's an easy way to fall into caricature. Bad caricature.

The secret of Greek Art is its imitation of nature even to the minutest details; whereas the secret of Indian Art is to represent the ideal. The energy of the Greek painter is spent in perhaps painting a piece of flesh, and he is so successful that a dog is deluded into taking it to be a real bit of meat and so goes to bite it. Now, what glory is there in merely imitating nature? Why not place an actual bit of flesh before the dog?

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

Never make heads straight on the shoulders, but turn them aside to the right or to the left, even though they look down, or upward, or straight ahead, because it is necessary for them to look lively and awake and not asleep. And do not depict the front or rear half of the whole person so that too much straightness is displaced, one half above or below the other half; and if you should wish to use stiff figures, do so only in portraying old people.

The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not be approved, and even if they are technically fine, this is no reason why they should offhand be judged to be correct, if their subject is lacking in the principles of reality carried out with no violations.

Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone and hospitalized a brick.

Everything in art is but a copy of nature.