Peggy Rathmann Quotes

Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!

Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.

Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.

An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

There's a certain visual grammar you've got to stick in. For example, if a character has just woken up, draw him in his pajamas with the bed a bit rumpled. Or if he's ill, draw little bottles with red crosses on that immediately communicate medicine, and a box of tissues.

Film for me became how I related to everything else.

The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.

Film is just a great medium to express yourself and a great environment to work around.

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

When you do not have the dialogue to explain things, you will use everything to show and to tell the story. I think that this is what makes you believe that it is impeccable.

The exciting thing about doing art for someone else's story is how I can translate their world through pictures, and that's always a pretty big challenge.

I do all my speeches in pictures. If I wrote words, I'd get locked in on them.

Some things can be perfectly expressed by sound alone and images would only be disturbing. Other times, sound would be possible, but visuals are much stronger and closer to what I want to express and then again, they sometimes overlap perfectly.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

I love illustrating for other writers because I am given stories I never would have thought of, and my work as an illustrator is always in support of the story.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.

For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoonist and caricature artist, so for me the visual is primary.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

I try not to look for messages in films.