Kerry James Marshall Quotes

Drawing takes time. A line has time in it

What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has a physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned.

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

Nature/Structure. There is no more to say. In my pictures I reduce to that. But 'reduce' is the wrong word, because these are not simplifications. I can't verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true.

The purpose of art is to stop time.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

picture, n. A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three.

It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

Time is very important to art and if you don't have the time to select, art goes out the window.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

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.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

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.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

A song is like a picture of a bird in flight; the bird was moving before the picture was taken, and no doubt continued after.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.