Ansel Adams Quotes

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

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

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

I guess I don't come to the work without baggage. I have an idea of what I want my pictures to look like in my head, and if they don't match up, I find it frustrating.

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

I have a visual imagination.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

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.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

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

I paint what I think, not what I see.

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.

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.

Every filmmaker has his own vision, and when they write a film or characters, they see certain people in those characters.

Studying technical design and art gave me the ability to see things in 3-D.

It's difficult for people to visualize from my drawings what it's going to be, so I often find myself talking them into things that they go along with, and when they see what's been made, they are surprised.

I sometimes close my eyes during a show because I have drawn a picture of an audience enjoying the show more on the back of my eyelids.

I see myself as a storyteller. So, when I read something, I see the story, and I see it on screen, in my head, in a certain way. I always want to see it and see me in it.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

The moment that you start to read a script, you're watching the movie in your mind, and that's the one moment that you have. Then, you go off to make the movie and you become so lost in it.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.