Pictorial Quotes

• I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

  Marc Chagall

  Psychics, Dimensions, Painting

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• It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

  Paul Klee

  Memories, Distance, Moving

  Paul Klee (1969). “Paul Klee notebooks”

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• The pictorial work was born of movement, is itself recorded movement, and is assimilated through movement (eye muscles).

  Paul Klee

  Eye, Movement, Born

  Paul Klee (2013). “Creative Confession - Paul Klee”, p.7, Tate Enterprises Ltd

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• The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.

  Yves Klein

  Artist, Creative, Serendipity

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• The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

  Jean-Jacques Annaud

  Art, Second Chance, Language

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• The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.

  Georges Braque

  Thinking, Color, Goal

  "Artists on Art: from the XIV to the XX Century". Book by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, p. 423, 1972.

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• The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.

  Johan Huizinga

  Average, Suggestions, Advertising

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• I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there

  Frank Stella

  Art, Successful, Want

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• Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics.

  Dumitru Tepeneag

  Dream, Order, Law

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Thoughts and emotions cannot be photographed, despite the protestations of some mystically minded portraitists. Physical fact is ultimately the sole pictorial material.

  William Mortensen

  Facts, Emotion, Sole

  William Mortensen, George Dunham (1956). “Model”

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• There is a cultural factor promoting violence which nowadays undoubtedly is highly effective is the mass media. And particularly everything that enters our minds through pictorial media.

  Alva Myrdal

  Media, Mind, Violence

  Alva Myrdal, Cecilia Åse, Yvonne Hirdman (2002). “"Något kan man väl göra: texter 1932-1982”

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• The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Finals, Realization

  "Hawthorne — The Painter; An Appreciation". Essay by Hans Hofmann, 1952.

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• No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

  John Ruskin

  Photography, Done, Literature

  John Ruskin (1908). “Complete Works of John Ruskin”

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• The mandala describes balance. This is so whatever the pictorial form.

  Stephen Gardiner

  Balance, Form

  Stephen Gardiner (2002). “The House: Its Origins and Evolution”, Ivan R Dee

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• The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.

  Paul Klee

  Art, Creativity, Entering

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• The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

  Paul Klee

  Beauty, Beautiful, Art

  Paul Klee, Felix Klee (1968). “The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918”, p.192, Univ of California Press

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• A work based only on a line concept is scarcely more than a illustration; it fails to achieve pictorial structure. Pictorial structure is based on a plane concept. The line originates in the meeting of two planes ... we can lose ourselves in a multitude of lines, if through them we lose our senses for the planes.

  Hans Hofmann

  Illustration, Two, Lines

  Hans Hofmann, Sara T. Weeks, Bartlett H. Hayes (1967). “Search for the Real: And Other Essays”, p.65, MIT Press

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• No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture - what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what.

  Roger Fry

  Art, Real, Understanding

  Roger Fry, Christopher Reed (1996). “A Roger Fry Reader”, p.362, University of Chicago Press

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• If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

  Paul Strand

  People, Vision, World

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• Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

  Gloria Steinem

  Home, Doors, Different

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, p.342, Open Road Media

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• Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context - which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Mean, Reflection

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• Cutting for Stone is nothing short of masterful -a riveting tale of love, medicine, and the complex dynamic of twin brothers. It is beautifully conceived and written. The settings are wonderfully pictorial. There is no doubt in my mind that Cutting for Stone will endure in the permanent literature of our time.

  Richard Selzer

  Brother, Cutting, Medicine

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• Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

  Michael Faraday

  Science, Ideas, Two

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• No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Breathing, Path, Combination

  Edgar Allan Poe (2013). “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.142, Simon and Schuster

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• The pictorial battlefield becomes a sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Struggle, Fog

  Winston Churchill (1965). “A Man of Destiny: Winston S. Churchill”

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