Visual Interpretation Quotes

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

It doesn't really exist; it's just basically lots of different stages between the two pieces, and you end up with, like, a third shape that doesn't exist but is suggested to you by the image.

The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.

I think directing and writing are very different jobs. Obviously, directing is a more social and managerial job. The other thing about directing is that it's a very, very pragmatic job, and writing isn't.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

Poetry, Painting & Music, the three Powers in man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not sweep away.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.

Everything looks better with my eyes closed.

My life is really a history of observing forms and taking in imagery. I don't mean in a photographic way, I mean in a way of feeling them structurally.

When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing — she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision.

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.