A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
JOHN BERGERPaintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
More John Berger Quotes
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All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
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She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
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It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGER -
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGER -
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.
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Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGER -
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
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But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
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This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
JOHN BERGER