Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'
Stan BrakhageRead
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of pure perception and experience over structured interpretation.
Stan Brakhage's quote highlights how true understanding and appreciation of the world comes from raw perception rather than learned concepts. He suggests that the untrained eye, unbound by societal conventions and definitions, can experience the world in a fundamentally deeper and more authentic way, implying that colors and forms exist beyond the limitations imposed by language and education.
Themes
PerceptionExperienceArtPerspectiveColors
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about visual arts to emphasize the importance of personal experience in creativity.
More from Stan Brakhage
All quotes →How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?
Stan BrakhageRead
Similar quotes
Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Ken RobinsonRead
By fairy hands their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung.
William CollinsRead
That was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main trouble—leisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got.
Charles BukowskiRead
I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.
Robert RauschenbergRead
My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
Patti SmithRead
There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
Beatrix PotterRead