John Fowles Quotes

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

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.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.

Sometimes people only see horrible, terrible things in my paintings.

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

It's hard for me to always explain my songs, and people always expect a meaning and to know what it's about. Sometimes when I write these songs I'm feeling a particular emotion, so to then come back and explain what I was feeling or put it into words is quite difficult.

When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

When I make a representation of something, this, too, is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.