Sean Booth Quotes

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

I think that at its best, painting can be an act of juggling perceptions, a hall of mirrors. And it can be a bit confusing and scattering. But as the artist, as the man behind the velvet rope who controls the smoke and the mirrors and the way that things move in the painted space, what I want to do is to try my best to be a good witness.

All statements are true, if you are free to redefine their terms.

The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?

"Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.

You must learn to see, what you are looking at

If a word means everything, then in means nothing.

There is no photograph more inherently photographic than another.

I start with no preconceived idea - discovery excites me to focus - then rediscovery through the lens - final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure - the shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation - the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera.

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

Philosophy is talk on a cereal box.

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things.

Fabio Celon did send me pages as he progressed, both in black and white and some color samples as well. It was really exciting to see the sketches and to see the story [The Kite Runner] shaping up visually.

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.