A Quote by Viggo Mortensen

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

Viggo Mortensen

Quote Topics

Communicating Extensions How Just Me My Way Painting Perceive Photography Poetry Things Those Way

Quote Author

Viggo Mortensen
American - Actor
Born: October 20, 1958

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

Vik Muniz

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

David Hockney

I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.

Stuart Franklin

I'm interested in that way we perceive things, and that was part of what I was getting into in painting - the idea of perception and how information goes through our heads and it comes out another way.

Kurt Wagner

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

Miroslav Tichy

I learn things in a backward way. I learn all those limitations, and slowly my brain soaks them up, and if things go right, you just, in an organic way, translate your ideas into those templates. That's the way I perceive the process happening.

Bob Odenkirk

To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku.

Frank Horvat

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.

Austin O'Malley

I want to enjoy the languor of just living, recognizing, acknowledging, taking it in, sort of amplifying it in some way. [Photography] is a great medium for that. It happens in an instant, but it gives you hours or days of time to reflect on things. It’s a beautiful system, this game of photography, to see in an instant and go back and think about later on. It’s pure philosophy. And poetry.

Joel Meyerowitz

For me photography had an immediacy... I was trying to resolve certain issues. What was fair or unfair about how people lived, and how they had to live? I thought the most penetrating and most immediate way to get to some of those questions was through photography.

Jerome Liebling

"So we'd get in a horse and buggy and we would go and park under a tree and we'd read poetry to each other." And my grandfather told me all the stories. I mean, their way of communicating... They didn't have telephones, either, so they communicated with the written word. And I really... That's how old [Bill] Clinton has become to me [speaking of how he met Hillary Clinton].

Rush Limbaugh

Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.

John Lanchester

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.

Lewis Mumford

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

Kehinde Wiley

Actually, I didn't study photography at first. I went to school for painting my first year, poetry my second year, graphic design my third and fourth year, and photography my fifth.