Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

The dark is light enough.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

Light is something that can really change your perception of space.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

How are things visible? Can you see an egg against a white background? Not by drawing a line around it can you make it evident.

Light knows when you're looking at it.

I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.

The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.

Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible.

There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

I’m interested that light has thingness itself, so it’s not something that reveals something about other things you’re looking at, but it becomes a revelation in itself.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

Remember...we don't see objects, we see light. [...] Light can do anything water can do--flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do--paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always light in a room.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.