Lauren Greenfield Quotes

I like taking my leads from what I see rather than trying to impose. I like that way of looking at things and seeing what's on screen and seeing how I can draw music out of it almost.

This ongoing coexistence which makes life sensational. The eyes have this ability to flip around what they see from one second to another, to see something as an object, and then as a design. That's really liberating, and I try to convey that in my work, that your eyes are free and you are free to use them.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.

I can only draw what I see.

It's one of those magical acts that is so poly-sensorial and culturally enriching that as a designer one is naturally drawn to the cult of the object

The majority of (painters), because they aren't colorists, do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South (of France) and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting...It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.

On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

When I'm directing, I really try not to be tied to anything. I don't even have the sides in my hands. I have other things - ideas that I want to make sure I don't forget or that I want to accomplish. The endeavor isn't about propping up the screenplay; but about the communal effort of exploration from a lot of different departments - the actors, the DP, the costume designer - all these people and myself.

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

My life is really a history of observing forms and taking in imagery. I don't mean in a photographic way, I mean in a way of feeling them structurally.