5 Quotes by John Berger about drawing


  • Author John Berger
  • Quote

    A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author John Berger
  • Quote

    Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author John Berger
  • Quote

    There is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and an au revoir! Alternately and ad infinitum.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author John Berger
  • Quote

    When I'm drawing - and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning - I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning.

  • Tags
  • Share