Frederick Franck Quotes

I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.

Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a way of being.

It is in order to really see, to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call 'The Ten Thousand Things' around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.

In this twentieth century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience.

Merely looking at the world around us is immensely different from seeing it.

I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life.... They are the artists of being alive.

We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes... Our looking is perfected every day, but we see less and less.

The eye awakened is the eye in love.

Everyone thinks he knows what a lettuce looks like. But start to draw one and you realise the anomaly of having lived with lettuces all your life but never having seen one, never having seen the semi-translucent leaves curling in their own lettuce way, never having noticed what makes a lettuce a lettuce rather than a curly kale.

You are not copying nature, but responding to nature in full awareness, to the way nature expresses itself in that object.

Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world.

I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen

While drawing grasses I learn nothing 'about' grass, but wake up to the wonder that there is grass at all.

To see the human condition in the old woman, in the child, in the model on the stand, in that particular human being, and to let the hand trace it, this act of adoration is called, 'drawing from life.

For you can look at things while talking or with a radio going full blast, but you can see only when the chatter stops.

The religions are delusional constructs formed around an infallible core.

This apple tree is not the first one I draw, but perhaps the thousandth. I feel the sap rise to its spreading branches. I feel in my toes how its roots grip the earth.

Do you believe in God? I, I believe in nothing but God!

Enlightenment is simply sanity~ the sanity in which I see my real situation in the living fabric of all that exists.

In the history of everyone in whom the artist-within has survived conditioning, schooling, training - there are (persons) influences that have kept him alive, awake .. who have encouraged him without even trying - just by being. They have been One's real teachers.

When the eye wakes up to see again, it suddenly stops taking anything for granted.

The local painters were my idols...These artists, too, were grown-ups, but they were grown-ups who could still see! Their eye was still in love! Like mine!

It is not that things are delusory but their separateness in the fabric of the Whole that is illusory.

The clearsighted eye turns the light back to see its own Original Nature.

If you still have to talk about Ultimate Reality See how it manifests itself nakedly in Every thing!