Observational Art Quotes

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

I love to go to the airports and just put on, like, dark glasses, so nobody can tell I'm staring at them, and just draw people.

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.

All these years I've sat in airports and kind of drawn people and put like Far Side captions on them.

Art is observing society around you, representing it through your eyes.

I am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at.

But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you're not snooping into somebody else's lives?

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

I love to just listen and watch. I could happily watch a security camera at a store. Often during a day I'll see a guy selling pretzels or an argument that somebody's having on a stoop and I'll think, "Oh I wish I had my camera, I wish I could capture this moment." There's something about people being people and interacting that can be so beautiful when it's framed by a camera. That desire to capture people as they are, and the stubbornness to keep going when they don't necessarily want you to capture them being who they are, are key.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

I'm not like a university-educated scholar. I just sing what I see.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

Early on I saw the plastic quality in colored people and had friends among them; and later was to work from colored models and friends, including Paul Robeson, whose splendid head I worked from in New York. I tried to draw Chinamen in their quarter, but the Chinese did not like being drawn and would immediately disappear when they spotted me.

I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors. The thing is done without your knowing it.

One must be of one's time and paint what one sees.

Draw places you have seen from memory. I used to paint things I had glimpsed through windows while riding in the elevated train.

As much as I'm not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it's quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.

I'm not drawn to people that much unless there's a really serious energy happening, but I'll take a lot of pictures of trees, or I'm always staring at the ground. I'll see an oil stain that looks like something out of 'Lord of the Rings' or something, and that's what kind of calls to me... I'm drawn to that aspect of photography.

Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.

My work is about the world I live in. So, I sort of make a picture of my life or our lives. I'm always looking for something that is overlooked, so I need to constantly be aware of what's going on.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

You have to reflect honestly what's around you in your music. I think a lot of people are just obsessed with their own relationships, so that is an honest reflection of what they see. A lot of people don't go much deeper than that.

All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles.