Ansel Adams Quotes

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

I think I work much the same way I always have. I'm trying to interpret something emotionally visually. I'm reading the brief or article, or listening to the music, and deciding where that sends me, and what would it look like.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

Life and art are inseparable.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

The artist is called a creator.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise, etc. Even if you do, sometimes there's a side of things that don't necessarily gel the way people intend. So there a bit of a mystical entity, film.