Chris Meledandri Quotes

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.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.

I enjoy the drawing more than the writing, so I try to think of ideas that will allow me to develop the visual side of the strip as fully as possible.

I'm really interested in making a mark on a paper and letting that be cursive shorthand for an idea - that's the origin of cartooning.

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.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

Be able to draw an illustration as least well enough to get your point across to another person.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination.

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

The strength of film is its accessibility and immediacy. But the strength of books is that freedom to really depict anything you want because people are going to be reading it in private. So, I'm always trying to write with the immediacy and the constant motion of film but I'm also trying to write with the complete freedom of subject matter that books have.

Always remember, there's no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different things. Any film stands on its own, apart from whether it's based on a novel.

When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing — she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.