Fred Perry Quotes

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

I am trying to represent design through drawing. I have always drawn things to a high degree of detail. That is not an ideological position I hold on drawing but is rather an expression of my desire to design and by extension to build. This has often been mistaken as a fetish I have for drawing: of drawing for drawing’s sake, for the love of drawing. Never. Never. Yes, I love making a beautiful, well-crafted drawing, but I love it only because of the amount of information a precise drawing provides

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.

The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

All my work begins with drawings. I don’t labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line. I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

When a young artist asked me for advice on drawing the human foot, I told him, ‘The first thing you must learn is how to take your shoe off, and then how to take your sock off, then prop your leg up carefully on your other knee, take a piece of paper, and draw your foot.’

Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of painting.

Has your drawing the meaning you saw in the model at first?

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

That's where the most beautiful art is always created, when you have someone not worried about what the outcome is.

I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they're almost never photos that I've taken.

It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.

Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution.

I started doing 'figures', then, one day, all of a sudden, I started doing abstraction. And then I started doing both. But it was never really a conscious decision. It was simply a question of desire. In fact, I really prefer making figurative work, but the figure is difficult. So to work around the difficulty I take a break and paint abstractly. Which I really like, by the way, because it allows me to make beautiful paintings.

I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing.

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

What's interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don't know anything about it - if it's going to work or not work.

It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.

I really spend as long as I can sketching everything out and working on the structure before I sit down to type out scenes.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

I still come closest to success with drawing.