C. S. Lewis Quotes

There isn't any art until some creature sees and consumes it. And has a reaction.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.

Good art should elicit a response of 'Huh? Wow!' as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?'

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

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

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design.

Art is an experience, not an object.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.