Illustration Art Quotes & Sayings

A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot — William Boyd

I was always interested in art at school, and after year twelve, senior year, I spent three years studying graphic design at college. I worked in advertising for two years but didn't like it much, then began doing a bit of illustration work for various publishers. — Graeme Base

Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice. — Shahzia Sikander

Inking is meditation in liquid form... — J.H. Everett

I got my diploma from Ealing College of Art, in graphics and illustration. — Freddie Mercury

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration. — Aaron Siskind

Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art. — Maria Popova

Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art. — John Burnside

If I make a painting, it should be seen for what it's set out to do too. A lot of the things that I do, it's not all art. Some of it's design, some of it's illustration, some of it's graphics, some of it's concept, some of it's business and some of it, hopefully, is art. — Ken Done

Having previously graduated from a 2-year commercial arts class, I thought that commercial illustration was the best way to make a living doing art. But the more tattoos that I did, the more I realized what artistic career potential tattooing had and I enjoyed it. — William Webb

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc. — Gerhard Richter

I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself. — Marina Abramovic

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once. — Aristotle.

There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms. (p. 12) — James Gurney

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. — John Wesley Powell

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live. — Frank Stella

One association with the arts that I vividly remember was a magazine called Normal Instructor, a teachers' magazine, that Miss George would hold up with illustrations of great artworks like [Vincent] van Gogh and Rembrandt [van Rijn]. — Paul Smith

I have little interest in illustration, which lacks a kind of transcendental quality. It is too literal. I find typography more straightforward, conceptual, and appealing, with its strict geometric vocabulary. There is a bridge between typographic design and fine art, especially since typography possesses a complex subtlety. The idea, the method, and the honesty in expression are central to a designer who works with type. — Timothy Samara

I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration - since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business - he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once. — Alex Raymond

I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half. — Molly Crabapple

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the "picture" end only with the paper. This method may be suitable for for photographs; but it is altogether inappropriate for the pictures that illustrate or are inspired by fairy-stories. An enchanted forest requires a margin, even an elaborate border. To print it coterminous with the page, like a "shot" of the Rockies in Picture Post, as if it were indeed a "snap" of fairyland or a "sketch by our artist on the spot", is a folly and an abuse. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The aim of art is to create space. — Frank Stella

A work of art in paint should be beautiful and expressive as abstract colour and form and should not interest us necessarily in any 'story' outside of itself - or else it belongs to the field of illustration. — John F. Carlson

Many cherish art as a special haven within an over-schematized world, where ambiguities can thrive. If an artwork's message is self-evident, maybe it's just an illustration, a decorative non-entity, a well-executed craft object, hardly counting as 'significant' art at all. It's not just that without an explanation the viewer is lost; without some written framework to steady it, the art itself risks losing its way, never gaining traction in the contemporary art system. From this perspective, both viewer and artwork alike are as if handicapped without the art-world's special assistance. — Gilda Williams

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls. — Zadie Smith

Jo examined the work of art nearest her, idly wondering what fortuitous concatenation of circumstances needed the melodramatic illustration of an Indian in full war costume, tumbling over a precipice with a wolf at his throat, while two infuriated young gentlemen, with unnaturally small feet and big eyes, were stabbing each other close by, and a disheveled female was flying away in the background — Louisa May Alcott

I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms. — Mika.

He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motercycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar. — Michael Thomas Ford

Anyone having to do with medicine will have looked at Frank Netter's art work ... I decided I would make him my model ... getting my degree in medical illustration and then going on to medical school. — David Bolinsky

A student researching into my work has actually traced the newspapers and magazines where I found theses images and has found out that many of them illustrate a collection of gruesome stories, murders and suicides which contrast with the images used. There is a contrast between the message carried by the text and that suppressed by the illustration. — Gerhard Richter