Edvard Munch Quotes

I think everything's fair in art and how you perceive a character.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion.

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

I don't think there is too much art involved in what I do.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I'm glad I made a piece of art that can be interpreted so widely. Art is always interpreted subjectively.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

I work from a subjective palette.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.

I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond

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.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)