Michael Sheen Quotes

People have done pornographic pictures forever, but most of the people who involve themselves in explicit sexuality aren't really artists.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend.

There were nude pictures... a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don't view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art.

Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.

I like to undress women - not to dress them. You know, like Manet's 'Olympia' or Helmut Newton's photographs - naked women with shoes. This is what I am trying to do.

I avoided nudity unless a film couldn't be told without those scenes. If you look at my films, few of them have that element, yet nudity and male fantasies have become emblematic of my work.

To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.

My works tends to be erotic.

All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.

When I found out after that first successful exhibition that the gallery wanted me to do another show like the first one, I come out two years later with four 6-foot drawings of classical nudes masturbating. The gallery director flipped the freak out!

There were a couple of instances where what I'm thinking during sex was relevant, so I might as well show myself having sex. I could have gone from a shot of the bed to just showing the ceiling and my thought bubble. Or maybe just show the feet.

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer... I often see things after the fact. So there’s a revelatory quality. And this definitely includes a sense of playfulness, because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.

A picture is the expression of an impression

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

The finest poetry was first experience.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

Painting doesn't have a function, not in the way that music or film does... I mean, you can dance to music. Music can be used for a soundtrack, so it has a function in that sense, beyond itself. But painting doesn't... But I do believe that painting has a purpose.