Steve Breen Quotes

I see the world in rectangles. If I am talking to someone, I find myself analysing their face, working out how to recreate it in bricks.

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking.

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos.

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.

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

There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.

Humans are generally much trickier to draw because we're so used to looking at and analyzing human faces. The slightest tweak makes a huge difference in how we perceive that character.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

Ideas come from the Earth. They come from every human experience that you’ve either witnessed or have heard about, translated into your brain in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.