#painting

What interests me is to set up what you might call the rapport de grand écart - the most unexpected relationship possible between the things I want to speak about, because there is a certain difficulty in establishing relationships in just that way, and in that difficulty there is an interest, and in that interest there is a certain tension and for me that tension is a lot more important than the stable equilibrium of harmony, which doesn't interest me at all. Reality must be torn apart in every sense of the word. What people forget is that everything is unique. Nature never produces the same thing twice. Hence my stress on seeking the rapport de grand écart: a small head on a large body; a large head on a small body. I want to draw the mind in the direction it's not used to and wake it up. I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn't have discovered without me. That's why I stress the dissimilarity, for example, between the left eye and the right eye. A painter shouldn't make them so similar. They're just not that way. So my purpose is to set things in movement, to provoke this movement by contradictory tensions, opposing forces, and in that tension or opposition, to find the moment which seems the most interesting to me. ↗

— Françoise Gilot

#reality-of-a-painting #nature

Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting. ↗

— Aeschylus

#blow #blurred #comes #fair #glitter

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings. ↗

— Balthus

#attempt #best #better #even #find

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. ↗

— Balthus

#emotions #order #painting #passage #possible

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. ↗

— Ansel Adams

#believe #everybody #paintings #people #photographs

Even if you have $20,000 to buy an item, you still try to get a good price at antique stores. I collect furniture, rugs, paintings, frames. It's my hobby to go around to shops and markets. ↗

— Ursula Andress

#around #buy #collect #even #frames

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does. ↗

— John Berger

#any #belongs #does #drawing #however

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#critic #exposing #flat #painting #protecting

Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people. ↗

— Kathryn Bigelow

#art form #audience #could #extraordinary #film

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event. ↗

— Theodore Bikel

#art #battles #cares #comes #down