Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

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

You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

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

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

I'm a big people watcher and a people talker. The beautiful thing about being an artist and a creative person is that you can get an idea from anywhere, and I'm always on the hunt for them.

An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.

Some directors are like poets.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

I try to create paintings that are a window for the imagination. If people look at my work and are reminded of the way things once were, or perhaps, the way they could be, then I've done my job.

Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.

Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.

If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

You can learn a lot from children because they see things new every day. That's the beauty of what you want to achieve as an artist - seeing things in a different way. Kids are constantly saying things that are funny and surprising and their observations are just... you know, they're like little artists themselves.

It's really the artist in me that loves the idea of an image and an image that provokes an emotion.