A Quote by Man Ray

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.

Man Ray

Quote Topics

Cannot Existence Imagination Paint Photograph Photographed Something Things Want

Quote Author

Man Ray
American - Photographer
August 27, 1890 - November 18, 1976

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.

Ellsworth Kelly

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

Man Ray

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.

Man Ray

It's not what you paint. It's how you paint it. You don't have to paint elaborate things. Paint simple things as beautifully as you can.

Helen Van Wyk

l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.

Man Ray

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

Willem de Kooning

I paint ideas, not things. My intention is less to paint works that are pleasing to the eye than to suggest great thoughts which will speak to the imagination and the heart and will arouse all that is noblest and best in man.

George Frederic Watts

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

Kehinde Wiley

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Wynn Bullock

Someone has asked me to paint Biblical pictures, and I say no, I'll not paint something that we know nothing about, might just as well paint something that will happen two thousand years hence.

Grandma Moses

Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

Paul Theroux

You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paint-chip Nazis.

Dave Barry

Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favourite thing - pencil is more my medium than wet paint.

Cy Twombly

It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph.