Hideo Kojima Quotes

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

If I was painting a picture, I wouldn't want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I'd rather show people what it looks like when it's done.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

My painting does not come from the easel.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

I want to make serious work that engages with serious subjects. I'm very lucky: I get to more or less make what I want.

When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

I've always tried to avoid music being direct therapy, and I've always found there's a power when you write something that can have its own interpretation - although I'm not being intentionally evasive.

Before anything else, I started painting bulls and matadors. That was my initiation to paint.