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It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

Bill Viola

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
BILL VIOLA

Images Inspiration Writing
When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional – a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.
BILL VIOLA

Art Hope Reflection Something Space
We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.
BILL VIOLA

Call Death Metaphor Moment Ourselves
My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it’s an image, and sometimes it’s words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.
BILL VIOLA

Fragment might Simple Writing
It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
BILL VIOLA

Impression Second Vision
Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.
BILL VIOLA

Intellectual Keys Thinking
Experience is so much richer than light falling on your retina. You embody a microcosm of reality when you walk down the street – your memories, your varying degrees of awareness of what’s going on around you.
BILL VIOLA

Embody Everything Experience Memories Microsm Retina
I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
BILL VIOLA

Flowing Keep Meaning Open
Human beings have always been creative. The guys who were making the pyramids, and archaeological research has showed us this, had little figurines made by the workers, to express their devotion to their god.
BILL VIOLA

Creative Devotion Express Guy Pyramids
Live your Art. Don’t think about it.
BILL VIOLA

Art Live Thinking
In the mid- to late ’60s to the mid-’70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.
BILL VIOLA

Art Change Students Thinking
Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It’s no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.
BILL VIOLA

Experiences Mystical Solitude Wisdom
There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
BILL VIOLA

Invisible Living World
Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
BILL VIOLA

Heart Individual Revolution
Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity… but theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.
BILL VIOLA

Feelings Identity Interconnected Rocks Tree
I hope we’ll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I’m in Paris, I’ll buy a big bottle of champagne and I’ll save it for that day, for the day when they’ll be no more camera.
BILL VIOLA

Able Cameras Paris

It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

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It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

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