A Quote by Mickalene Thomas

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

Mickalene Thomas

Quote Topics

Collages Myself Painting Photographer Photographs Resource See Still

Quote Author

Mickalene Thomas
American - Artist
Born: January 28, 1971

A photographer who wants to see....must recognize the value of the familiar. Your ability to see is not increased by the distance you put between yourself and your home. If you do not see what is all around you every day, what will you see when you go to Tangiers?....Good seeing doesn't ensure good photographs, but good photographic expression is impossible without it.

Freeman Patterson

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

Frank Stella

As a professional photographer I take photographs for other people to see - but I want them to see what I see. So I never assume that only a few people will appreciate what I do. At all times, the public should be able to understand what I've done, even if they don't understand how I've done it.

Elliott Erwitt

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

James Rosenquist

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

Philip Guston

Just the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.

Peter Adamson

A good photograph will prove to the viewer how little our eyes permit us to see. Most people, really, don’t see-see only what they have always seen and what they expect to see-where a photographer, if he’s good, will see everything. And better if he sees things he doesn’t expect to see.

Leon Levinstein

I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.

William Klein

I'm pretty lenient with myself about time - if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It's all part of the same thing for me.

Matthea Harvey

The transition from painter to artist comes when you cross the line of painting what you see to painting what you feel about what you see.

T. Allen Lawson

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Ivan Eyre

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

Michael Craig-Martin

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

Catherine Opie

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C. S. Lewis

I see myself as a storyteller. So, when I read something, I see the story, and I see it on screen, in my head, in a certain way. I always want to see it and see me in it.