Quotes About Art

Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all.

It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.

The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality.

It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background.

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.

There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination.

O, how much simpler things would be If eyes could paint or brush could see.

The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.

As any artist can tell you, it is easier to reach perfection than to stop there.

An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.

In the nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene.

Cinema, like music, should wash away the dust of everyday life.

Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.

Le cinéma sonore a inventé le silence.

There must, at a certain point, be a transformation. If not, there is no art.

An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theatre, not the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting. (What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theatre, the novel, painting capture with theirs).

Life drifting, in its continuous, unpredictable flow. Life inimitable. Japanese Buddhism teaches us that art (or bliss) is surprise, it cannot be calculated. It is a prey, a catch: "Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod" (the fish that arises from nowhere).

To Bresson, art is the only possible escape from the bitterness of impotence.

Art is not in the mind. Art is in the eye, in the ear, in the memory of our senses. Images, dreams.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.[3]

A whole made of good images can be detestable.

Ton public n'est ni le public des livres, ni celui des spectacles, ni celui des expositions, ni celui des concerts. Tu n'as à satisfaire ni le goût littéraire, ni le théâtral, ni le pictural, ni le musical.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.