Quotes by Painters - Page 22

The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age... So the Canadian artist was drawn North.
Lawren Harris
The only real influence I've ever had is myself.
Edward Hopper
The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.
Kenyon Cox
The painting has a life of its own
Jackson Pollock
The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.
Lucian Freud
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
Marc Chagall
The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.
William Blake
I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.
Wayne Thiebaud
This is the essence of Rembrandt's advice to Van Hoogstraten: the authentic craft develops naturally from one's own experience.So, it seems reasonable to suggest that the search should not be for the lost secrets, but for one's own practice. This is in fact easy, you start making things. At first they might not be perfect, but the information here should provide you with a running start. And, if you are cut out for this the learning curve will not be daunting, because you will realize that you are finally headed in the right direction: towards the living craft.
Tad Spurgeon
I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted
Max Ernst
The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.
Robert Henri
No man can roan or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of awareness and his discipline in expression, is perhaps more understanding of its moods and spirit than others are. He is thus better equipped to interpret it to others, and then, when her has become one with its spirit, to create living works in their own right, by using forms, colors, rhythms and moods, to make a harmonious home for the imaginative and spiritual meaning it has evoked in him.
Lawren Harris
Concentrate on a single feature – as, build all toward one eye – make all lines lead toward that eye. (Robert Henri)
Robert Henri
Truly, art is embedded in nature; he who can extract it, has it.
Albrecht Dürer
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco de Goya
Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
Paul Klee
Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.
Paul Klee
Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.
Arthur Rackham
Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.
Lawren Harris
A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together.One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.
Jasper Johns
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.
Marc Chagall
Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
Jackson Pollock
Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. ... Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. ... Make a drawing flow, stopping sometimes, and going on. ... Search for the simple constructive forces, line the lines of a suspension bridge. Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out. ... Have purpose in the places where lines stop.
Robert Henri
He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir---
Edouard Manet
Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.
Robert Henri
Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.
Max Beckmann
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
Wassilly Kandinsky
If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
Arnold Schoenberg
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
Giorgio de Chirico
[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
Paul Gauguin
Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.
John Sloan
Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.
Robert Henri
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
Robert Henri
If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
Robert Henri
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
Jasper Johns
In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and party due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.
Jasper Johns
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
Mark Rothko
If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.
Grandma Moses
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
Henri Matisse
My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.
Jasper Johns
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
Marc Chagall
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
every good artist paints what he is
Jackson Pollock
Art is a harmony parallel with nature
Paul Cézanne
Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
Robert Henri
Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
Jasper Johns
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
Vasily Kandinsky
I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
Andrew Wyeth
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
Jasper Johns
In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.
Vincent van Gogh
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
Edward Hopper
More of me comes out when I improvise.
Edward Hopper
Art is the giving by each man of his evidence to the world. Those who wish to give, love to give, discover the pleasure of giving. Those who give are tremendously strong.
Robert Henri
Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.
Robert Henri
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
Vincent van Gogh
The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir