Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
John Berger
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Public
Demands
Artist
Directly
Needs
Related
Work
Drawing
Statue
Finished
Statues
Private
Presented
Communication
Canvas
Demand
Essentially
More quotes by John Berger
The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
John Berger
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
John Berger
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
John Berger
Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
John Berger
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
John Berger
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
John Berger
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
John Berger
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
John Berger
Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
John Berger
Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
John Berger
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
John Berger
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
John Berger