Fernand Leger Quotes

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

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.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

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

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

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

Painting demands an intelligent model.

Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this.

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

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

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 very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.