John Ruskin Quotes

There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

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.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

Art is when things appear rounded.

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon... We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

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.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

It is not like adding wrinkles to look older; it is using the wrinkles I already have to say something else. What is disturbing is not seeing more lines on my face but seeing that the range of possibilities of what I can do is much more limited.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

There is something about the way I photograph. People often say, 'Are you cross with me?' My eyes can look sort of... like a wall.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible.

With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.