John Berger Quotes

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

The artist is called a creator.

The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two-mind or hand -was responsible for the work.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

In a way, artists are shamans, facilitators who take what's there, channel it through themselves, then put it out there for people to appreciate.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

I'll write, because I'll give - You critics means to live; For should I not supply - The cause, the effect would die

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.

I criticise these compositions by analysis but an illustration cannot be made that way - it must be made by inspiration.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

The artist... standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams - 'a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty.' To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.