Wayne McGregor Quotes

Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I've learnt to zoom out again. Because if I'm not actually feeling it, there's not much point making it in the first place.

What higher art does is to invite us in and allow us to make decisions.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

One of the things I like about music is it's an abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

I'm always interested in hearing how other people read and react to my songs. I hadn't thought of it in just that way.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.