John Van Hamersveld Quotes

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it, and I put pictures in it.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

I didn't think that personal style had much value in graphic design.

I work on fittings, mostly. You know, I sketch less and less in my work. I sketch for the show sometimes, but then it becomes more conceptual. But when I don't sketch, it becomes more pragmatic.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

I try to look at design from a more conceptual standpoint.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

If I was painting a picture, I wouldn't want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I'd rather show people what it looks like when it's done.

My background was in graphic design, but when I was doing it, it was all hand-drawn stuff, not computers.

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

You know, the only way I've found to make these pictures is with animators. You can't seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together; they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.