Chaim Potok Quotes

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

Music is an expression of individuality; it's how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there - express it - whether it's sculpture, dance or singing.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

When we make the show, we are always talking about how the show is really in between what we make and what the viewer thinks of it.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world.

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

I paint my own reality.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.'

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.