Balthus Quotes

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

Art demands constant observation.

I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

Draw what you see.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same.

Every single thing you see on-screen came out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

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

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Now painting is different. It's something recollected in tranquility.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.