Lauren DeStefano Quotes

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea.

When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, 'This is my vision.'

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage.

To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I'm not a designer, I'm a creator.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

A chair, it's like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.