Jodie Foster Quotes

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.

We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

I've always been a creative person, and I'd always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles - like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

I go to contemporary galleries all around the world when I can. There's always something historical and something contemporary; those are my rock references.

Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.