Charles M. Blow Quotes

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

I look at graphic design as communication, meaning that the work has to have a vibe to connect to the viewer or perceiver. I make a black and white drawing and then add color digitally, bringing in a contemporary pattern to the composition to create a vibrance.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.

I don't deal in terminology, I deal with expressions: colors, shapes, tones, characteristics.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Art has definitely influenced how I think of design, both as individual items and as a body of work.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.

Walt put everything he knew about communication with images into the park, so it was very familiar.

I try to do a lot of asymmetrical, triangular compositions - I find those work really well for comic book covers in that portrait mode, and I don't always see that in other artists.

I paint landscapes, figuratives. I painted all my life. In fact, I started as a commercial artist.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.