Realistic Art Quotes

I know that when I finish a drawing, my anxiety level decreases. The realistic drawings are a way of pinning down an idea. I don't want to loose it. With the abstract drawings, when I'm feeling loose, I can slip into the unconscious.

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

Photorealism's goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can't beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

I'm a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I'd like anything by him - particularly a painting called 'Madame Hessel on the Sofa.' His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.

I think that nudity is beautiful. Sometimes it can be awful, but when it's beautiful? Cinema is the art about reality; it's art from reality. In French we say l'art de la realite. You show reality, so you have to show bodies.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

I do not think that any realism is beautiful.

... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well.

My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.

We go for our own reality. I remember some of our guys saying it is way harder to make stylized art directed explosions of jade rather than a regular explosion of shrapnel.

I studied realism when I was in art school.

Social realism takes research.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.

Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents; what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.