A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?
Mostly you write to find out what you have to say.
What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.
I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.
Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?
don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
You know I was curious - I was interested in all kinds of mystery or deeper meanings in the paintings because I myself have not analyzed why they have turned out like this or like that.
I am a storyteller and a researcher, and I'm sorry the world has a hard time straddling the tension of those two things, but that's who I am.
As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.
In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
Politicians think they have answers for everything. We artists, we only have questions.
As an artist, one doesn't know what is real. And so there's a search and a process of trying to locate something that feels or appears or somehow resonates with us on a deeper level. This is why art is such an interesting business to be in.
The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.
When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'
I'm not so interested in the expression of something, but I'm more interested in what the material can do. And so that's why I keep exploring.
I am an artist... It's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, 'I know all about it. I've already found it.' As far as I'm concerned, the word means, 'I am looking. I am hunting for it. I am deeply involved.'
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.
A director should not define everything. For me, the movie is a form of a question I pose to the others or to the audience. I want to ask their opinion on my point of view and discuss it with them.
I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes.
To come to grips with creativity, I must ask creative, adventurous questions - the kind which, in all likelihood, cannot be answered.
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.
