Rashid Johnson Quotes

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.

Light is everything in photographs and has to be considered in all situations.

The substance of painting is light.

My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify, and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity.

Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends.

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

Photography is about light and what it does and how it is captured on a piece of negative.

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

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

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

The dark is light enough.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

I love taking pictures of food.

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.

One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

I paint in acrylic and sometimes in oil. Sometimes I'll paint my kids. And I'll occasionally do some photography.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

In the bit of painting that I've done, I'm interested in colour and texture. I'm very interested in transparency.