Kathe Kollwitz Quotes

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.

I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.

Your instincts for what's dramatic are the same whether you're working on a drawing or on a script.

Directing is its own monster with its own set of muscles and exercises.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.

It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one's own hand - that is what is necessary.

In a photo, you just do a click, but in art you have to put in so much energy. This concentration of energy and attention says something that other media cannot say.

It is probably like an artist. They see in their head what they want to draw, and they draw it. It is like I have a feeling inside me that I want to create on a horse, and that is what I do.

There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.

I know how to paint... In a way there is a boredom there because a lot of the magic is gone.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

Drawing is the root of everything.

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two-mind or hand -was responsible for the work.

An editor is like a painter. There is a magic in that.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

You can't have problems with hand movement, if you're going to be a good putter.

I've always had an artistic hand. I took on paint when I started falling in love with the abstract expressionists. I approached it from a physical standpoint, but I've also been honing my compositional eye through film.