Perceptual Art Quotes

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.

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.

Art is what everyone knows it is.

The essence of painting has actually always been to make it [the universal] plastically perceptible through colour and line.

Art is the reordering of nature - the qualities of space and time - in new perceptual and material form.

'Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being... You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

My art is about paying attention - about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.

An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.