Leon Battista Alberti Quotes

Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Magic is my paint.

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.

The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.

Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

Real art must always involve some witchcraft.

Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live.

Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.

Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

I believe that art has incredible power.

Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

There's nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It's endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating.

I so love the animation process. Interesting, everything that I do in animation, the kind of crafting and skills of storytelling, totally work within the structure of the Disney nature films. In a weird way, I like to think that animation is like painting, and Disney nature is like sculpting. Animation you start with a blank canvas and you paint. With Disney nature, you start with a big block of imagery and you hone it down into your final story. Somewhere you end up with something kind of pretty to watch.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.