It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
JOHN BERGERPicasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
More John Berger Quotes
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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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.
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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
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
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That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
JOHN BERGER