There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
JOHN BERGERIt dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
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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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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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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.
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We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGER