Scarlett Moffatt Quotes

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be the high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, I was struck by what I would learn.

A piece of art is a compact form of the universe.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

As a boy, I used to look upon the hieroglyphics as so many wonderful pictures.

Throughout history, clothes represented who you were; they are a great vehicle for explaining who you are. During the Ching dynasty, for example, what you wore and how it was made reflected your status in society. People could literally read your clothes like a book, just by its color and how it was embroidered.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.

The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.

Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.

The power of the story sheds a light and great perspective on well known facts. The power of cinema draws on that collective history.

No matter what your cultural sophistication or what language you speak, everyone can understand images.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.

I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

I always collect images, maybe because I was working with historic material - but even if I were working with contemporary material, I would do the same thing. I keep a kind of index of them while I'm working. I find them incredibly useful, not so much to illustrate a time, but to give some sense of the feeling of a time.

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

I've always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don't just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.