James Agee Quotes

I look at everything in an artistic way.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees. They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him. ... The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well. ... Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

An artist's business is only to see.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

Seeing is in some respect an art, which must be learnt.

Beauty is not the divine in a cloak of physical reality; no, it is physical reality in a cloak that is divine. The artist does not bring the divine on to the earth by letting it flow into the world; he raises the world into the sphere of the divine.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Artistic vision comes from a mind clear enough to fall in love with what we see.

Artistic vision is having the clarity to fall in love with what you see.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

A person is quite different from a tree or rock or stream. By introducing the nude into my pictures, I started perceiving all the things I was photographing in new ways. In contrast or opposition to each other, things became much more significant and interesting, revealing many more qualities than I had ever dreamed of knowing and expressing. By using the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.