Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

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

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

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.

Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.

Art is not nature... There was a lot more to be got out of color.

Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.

Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

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.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.