Roy Lichtenstein Quotes

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

Paint your picture by means of the lights. Lights define texture and color - shadows define form.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.

[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

I'm overwhelmed by writers. Most people aren't impressed by writers, but if you can draw a cartoon or a picture, they think you're magic.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.