Douglas Portway famous quotes

Any art which can be subjected to an analytical process is, by this very fact, removed from the possibility of being art.
-- Douglas Portway

#Art #Facts #Possibility

Ideally there is a type of continuum which flows from life through the artist's sensibility and his materials... the concreteness of the object and its own life , through the spectator, with his expectations, interpretations, back into life.
-- Douglas Portway

#Artist #Expectations #Flow

There must be something in oneself which is essential. Therefore I refrain from referring to a landscape or certain objects when speaking of a picture. The hand is cleverer than the mind.
-- Douglas Portway

#Hands #Mind #Essentials

I want my paintings to have a light of their own, they must glow from inside...
-- Douglas Portway

#Light #Want #Painting

Art is precisely that condition which pertains when, after all analysis and reduction to parts has taken place, there remains a 'quality' which is more than the sum of those parts, which could not exist in any other form, and which cannot be caught, or held, or contained.
-- Douglas Portway

#Art #Taken #Quality

I believe that one of the most important properties of a work of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites, and in their fusion to achieve a 'wholeness' or 'oneness,' the experiencing of which should be revelatory - both for the artist and the spectator - something akin to the experience of enlightenment in terms of religion.
-- Douglas Portway

#Art #Believe #Opposites

My paintings should become objects into which one could float, as in water, so that one's mind is hung... suspended, and the emanation of the painting would penetrate into people's consciousness.
-- Douglas Portway

#Space #People #Water

When a spectator approaches a painting with his own particular set of filters or theories, be they historical, political, intellectual or whatever - he either finds what he is looking for or dismisses the work as irrelevant. He has deprived himself of the possibility of any fresh experience or revelation by looking only for confirmation of that which he already 'knows.
-- Douglas Portway

#Political #Historical #Intellectual

The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

As a kid, I was always into art at the same time as computers, and eventually I realised I was making more interesting stuff with my keyboard than with my hands. I really enjoyed modifying computer games more than playing them, so that got me into programming.

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.

I'm always honored, but I think for every 100 of those that come along, one of them is actually going to happen. And, the fact that this was an offer on a major film that had a start date, was pretty impressive.

When there is no possibility of retreat, we will find the innovation that only the liminal situation can bring. In short, we find the faith of leap.

When I am willing to step into the realm of uncertainty and ambiguity, I open myself up to infinite possibilities.