Fingerprint Art Quotes

But somehow, even when we are grown up and “adjusted,” everything we do and are—our handwriting, the vibrato of our voice, the way we handle the bow or breathe into the instrument, our way of using language, the look in our eyes, the pattern of whorling fingerprints on our hand—all these things are symptomatic of our original nature.

An artist is a conduit for a vision that is as uniquely her own as a fingerprint, and unrecognizable until it appears.

A disorganized killer is much more impulsive and haphazard. Disorganized killers make mistakes, leave fingerprints, fail to keep from being seen. Organized killers consider murder to be an art that they are trying to perfect. They don’t make mistakes.

Human taste is as varied as human fingerprints,” Wit said. “Nobody will like everything, everybody dislikes something, someone loves that thing you hate—but at least being hated is better than nothing. To risk metaphor, a grand painting is often about contrast: brightest brights, darkest darks. Not grey mush. That a thing is hated is not proof that it’s great art, but the lack of hatred is certainly proof that it is not.

Through books we can time travel, play make-believe and even create our own intangible art using the words to paint complex and vivid images in our minds. Your own interpretations of what’s on a page, like snowflakes or fingerprints, will never be the same as someone else’s. And to me, that’s the magic that books hold: Preserved in dried ink, on flattened paper, between two covers, that make up the endless world of possibilities lost in a page of carefully curated characters The unread books that have been staring you in the face for the past five years that you swear you could have read, or books that took you years to read that evolved along with your life; those that were bought for you as gifts or those that you bought yourself as a treat after a testing semester at school. The books that remind you of someone you loved, the books you forgot to return to a friend, or the coffee table books you will likely never read, and be pleasantly surprised by their pages when they are opened for the first time by a visiting friend.

While amassing one of the most lucrative fortunes in the world, the Kochs had also created an ideological assembly line justifying it. Now they had added a powerful political machine to protect it. They had hired top-level operatives, financed their own voter data bank, commissioned state-of-the-art polling, and created a fund-raising operation that enlisted hundreds of other wealthy Americans to help pay for it. They had also forged a coalition of some seventeen allied conservative groups with niche constituencies who would mask their centralized source of funding and carry their message. To mobilize Latino voters, they formed a group called the Libre Initiative. To reach conservative women, they funded Concerned Women for America. For millennials, they formed Generation Opportunity. To cover up fingerprints on television attack ads, they hid behind the American Future Fund and other front groups. Their network’s money also flowed to gun groups, retirees, veterans, antilabor groups, antitax groups, evangelical Christian groups, and even $4.5 million for something called the Center for Shared Services, which coordinated administrative tasks such as office space rentals and paperwork for the others. Americans for Prosperity, meanwhile, organized chapters all across the country. The Kochs had established what was in effect their own private political party.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

yet voice is something like the fingerprint of the writer—not the persona on the page but the writer with her own particular linguistic quirks, sentence rhythms, and recurring images. The memoirist needs to have this fingerprint too, even if she only speaks as herself.

humans have few redeeming qualities, but their fingerprints are miniature works of art.

A fully developed aboriginal has, in his own way, a vast amount of knowledge. Although it may not be strictly what is called scientific, still, it is very exact knowledge; and his powers of physical observation are developed to the utmost. For instance, an aboriginal living under primitive conditions knows the anatomy and the haunts and the habits of every animal in the bush. He knows all the birds, their habits, and even their love-language—their mating notes. He knows from various signs the approach of the different seasons of the year, as well as from the positions of the stars in the heavens. He has developed in the highest degree the art of tracking the human footprint. He knows the track of every individual member of the tribe. There is as much difference and individuality in footprints as in fingerprints. There is a whole science of footprints.

When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes. That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills.

Like a handprint in cement An indelible mark has been left My identity has been bent At the point where your fingers pressed. Some people leave their marks All over your identity; Some leave beautiful art And others graffiti obscenities.

press charges. Meanwhile see what Angela Sullivan has to say for herself, find the house and have it forensically examined—that’s if it’s still standing.’ Arrests would mean fingerprints, thought Auhl. Then they could run those prints against the prints on the gun. ‘Boss.’ OUTSIDE SULLIVAN’S HOUSE Auhl stretched the kinks in his spine. Too much charging around the countryside in a car. He followed Claire to the front door, pressed the bell. Nothing. Pounded his fist. Nothing. ‘Let’s try around the back.’ The side path took them to a typical suburban yard: small garden beds, flowers, shrubs and a vegetable plot, all showing some semblance of design—rock borders painted white, a wooden garden seat artfully angled beneath a small gum tree, a wheelbarrow doubling as a flowerpot. Neat, but in an ongoing

Drewe set to work manipulating history. In one brazen but typical ploy at the National Art Library, he razored apart a catalog from a 1955 show at a London gallery that had since gone out of business. Then he created new pages with photographs of Myatt forgeries, added captions in the proper typeface, inserted the false pages among the real ones, reassembled the catalog, and set it back on the shelves. The scheme, which focused not on the paintings themselves but on the documentation that proved the paintings’ bona fides, was ingenious. Why bother going through surgery to change your fingerprints if you can change the fingerprint records in the FBI files?

As Zen practitioners might say. two people looking at the same mountain are not seeing the same mountain, and so poetic "worldliness" can take an infinite number of versions: the sensibility of an individual artist is as distinct as a fingerprint.

A French cook (...) is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook's inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks it again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pick fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish and hands it to the waiter. (...) Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung onto a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

I want to take our museum bodies and turn them into art galleries to show us how lovely we are. I want to dust off the fingerprints of old lovers, take down the signs that name our bodies ancient history, turn every wounded object inside us into something that can still be looked at and seen as beautiful, not an object from an era we are glad we are not living through any more. I want us to love ourselves like we love art. I want whole gallery walls dedicated to our soft hearts, vermilion and crimson and indigo across canvas after canvas framed in gold. I want sculptures made from the tears we cried over losing everything. I want our skins to be a celebration: The texture is what makes this art, all these lines and blemishes and spots that show the artist's love. I don't want us to look at ourselves as forgotten things we hate any more. I want us to look at ourselves and see art.

Rules breed rebels. I think it’s important to think for yourself when making art. That way you’re leaving a mark as uniquely yours as your own fingerprints. We’ve all been taught that the black sheep is a deviation from acceptable standards and something to be avoided. Still, when you see it amongst a herd, its lack of conformity is what steals your breath and captures your attention.

Rules breed rebels. I think it’s important to think for yourself when making art. That way you’re leaving a mark as uniquely yours as your own fingerprints. We’ve all been taught that the black sheep is a deviation from acceptable standards and something to be avoided. Still, when you see it amongst a herd, its lack of conformity is what steals your breath and captures your attention.

I'd insist that we all out same canvases and paint together. You might not want to, but I'd assure you that we needn't be so worried about painting masterpieces. People are the masterpieces, and you are creative because you are God's best creation and HI fingerprints and brush strokes dance all inside of you. Then I'd hold up my written rules for paintbrush holders. Everyone must try. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. Refuse to be intimidated by the process. The most beauty will emerge from the paintbrushes held by those who are most free from fear. Smile. I already love what will soon come to life on your canvas. Then we'd paint. And you'd discover you actually like it. Your piece would turn out amazing, and together we'd think through the perfect place for you to hang it up in your house... We are slowly coming out of hiding. It feels good to be vulnerable with artwork and with each other.