Visual Insight Quotes

You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him. ... The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well. ... Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing. I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people see things.

To be a visionary, all you have to do is make decisions based off of your eyes instead of your ears and your memory.

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

Living and working for four decades in a Bologna apartment and studio he shared with his unwed sisters, Morandi painted little but bottles, boxes, jars, and vases. Yet like that of Chardin and the underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's work seems to slow down time and show you things you've never seen before.

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

Don't ask me about this building or that one, don't look at what I do, see what I see.

My inspiration has always been photography's ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn't have that.

Artwork can be a portal, a kind of rethinking and reseeing of the world as we live it.

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

What’s so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven’t even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

Young men mend not their sight by using old men's spectacles.

I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.

Women see through Claude Lorraines.

What counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.