Shirin Neshat Quotes

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

I was being an artist, being sensitive and technical as artists are. I'm sure Leonardo Da Vinci did that. Artists don't always feel the same as others feel about their work.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

I just see potential in things that aren't there and how it's going to make you feel. Like, if it makes me feel a certain way, I try and create the vibe of how that felt to me. And try and create it for someone else.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

Make good art.

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.