Wolfgang Tillmans Quotes

I am an illusionist. That's why I create art.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Real talent is mixing realism with bluff. Every great artist I really respect has a certain amount of bluff; sooner or later you have to be a conjurer, and conjure images.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

I always talk about if you want to be an artist, you have to be authentic because people can tell bullshit a mile away. There is nothing wrong with creating a character, standing behind that character, and that being an authentic performance piece, because that's a piece of art as well. But if you want to be an artist in any form, you have to know to come with it.

I use people's real voices because I want realism. So often I mention the actors' physicality because I want it to be like a real documentary.

Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people.

We are all illusionists and that's why we are attracted to drag queens. This whole world is an illusion. It's not real.

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

I like having to figure out how to pull things off, how to sell it, how to make it look real, but not just real, make it look better.

There are things going on in galleries recently that have shocked me. What I'm going to say is really controversial, but what I find the most provocative is the commerciality of art in general. And the fact that a lot of people have forgotten what the meaning of art is and what the intention behind it is.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

It's so much more fun to do the work than to talk about it. I will have to admit that. Everybody gets to decide how they feel, and what to take away by themselves, and that's what you hope for. That people will take away different things and have different experiences from the work we do as actors. So I don't like to prescribe how to feel about the work I do.

...what I try to do is a good bad picture. I work it out very carefully, and then I do something that looks as if it went wrong.

I'm not real. I'm theatre.

The romantic artist expects people to ask, 'What has he got to say?' The classical artist expects them to ask, 'How does he say it?

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

People look to the future for salvation, but the future never arrives.

In real life, I always look at people and how they walk, or how they carry themselves. I think about the body a lot, in performance.

I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.

[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. ... Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.

I would advise him who wishes to imitate well, to look closely into life and manners, and thereby to learn to express them with truth.

I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.