Frank Auerbach Quotes

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

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.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

The artist must ask you to think of the world in a different way, and sometimes it's a more abstract way; sometimes it's a completely different kind of colouring.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

I have admired David Bromley's work for years. He possesses such a wild and vivid imagination and really sees the beauty in everything.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Draw what you see.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

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 read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.

My mom's an artist in every way. She's a painter, a photographer. She's a wanderer - always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

I just see potential in things that aren't there and how it's going to make you feel. Like, if it makes me feel a certain way, I try and create the vibe of how that felt to me. And try and create it for someone else.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.