artistic foundation Quotes

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it's reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the '50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.

'Analyze This' is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing. I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense.

Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.

For me, drawing is everything, because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It's the way I begin everything.

And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process.

Well, all I can say is thank goodness I had 15 years of theater before ever I did film roles. You build technique that you can rely on.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.

A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.

I'm old fashioned. I really think you should know how to draw before you start painting. I use charcoal and graphite; I put a skylight in. In my house, I turned the garage into an art studio. So I'm awash in art studios.

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word.

The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

Drawing is the root of everything.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

I studied voice when I was at school, and I was in the chamber choir, and I studied music theory as well, so I guess a lot of it came from being taught at school.

I have done four years of rigorous theatre before I finally started doing films.

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

The theater I got to do informs every move I make as an actor and will for the rest of my life. I can't shake it if I wanted to, but I don't want to.

I was nurtured to play music pretty much from birth.

I began as a violinist, not a composer. Thus my contact with orchestral musicians, with the source of music, is very important.

Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whether he is going. Practice must always be founded on sound theory, and to this Perspective is the guide and the gateway; and without this nothing can be done well in the matter of drawing.