Terry Pratchett Quotes

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

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

What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing.

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

I like art with a visible string to the world.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

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.

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop