Greig Fraser Quotes

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

I just love the world of photography.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Cleanliness is the scourge of art.

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

The older I got, the less pretentious I got in my art tastes and work.

I love photography myself.

I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

Concision in art is a necessity and an elegance. The verbose painter bores: who will get rid of all these trimmings?

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.