John Berger Quotes

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

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.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

I think all art - if it's good - is a result of really trying to create something that you can't put into words. Where language ends is where good art begins.

The role of art in society is not to resolve conflicts; rather, it is to express these conflicts and antagonisms.

A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.

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

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

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.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Painting, especially much better than words, allows oneself to express the various stages of thought, including the deeper levels, the underground stages of the mental process.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

The job of the artist is to point at things.

[My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.

It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

I feel I have a responsibility to myself, a responsibility to explain where we're coming from. Because a song or the performance of a song is a lot like a work of art.

The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.