Quotes

"Art expresses all that is best in us. Our desires, our hopes, our truth. And so art changes, but it doesn't get better." - Sister Wendy Beckett

"The great problem to resolve is to bring everything, including the tiniest details of the picture, within the harmony of the whole." - Camille Pissarro

"I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely. At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it." - Camille Pissarro

"Art is a continuous activity with no separation between past and present." - Henry Moore

"In art, the genuine creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome." - Henri Matisse

"Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind." - Leonardo da Vinci

"The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence..." - Robert Henri

"You can be sure that most of the high positions in the country would be empty if one were admitted only after an examination as severe as the one we painters must pass." - Jean Simeon Chardin

"You want accuracy, but not representation. If you know how to make the figuration, it doesn’t work. Anything you can make, you make by accident. In painting, you have to know what you do, not how, when you do it." - Francis Bacon

"The painter who stands before a blank canvas must think in terms of paint." - Ben Shahn

"No limit may be set to art, neither is there any craftsman that is fully master of his craft." - Phahoptep, Egyptian Sculptor

"The making of a good portrait is the use of intelligence of what is essentially the features of the person, the gesture to be painted. By that I mean the something that enables you to recognize your friends a block or two away." - Robert Henri

"The goal of painting is not to make a picture - however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a byproduct and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign of what has passed. The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more-than-ordinary moment of existence." - Robert Henri

"We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are." - Max DePree

"To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have." - From Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

"Everything shows me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, which is more often silent than heard." - Wassily Kandinsky

"I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing.... Then I want to do something modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil will be able to hold without technique." - Paul Klee

"I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it." - Andrew Wyeth

"I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes." - Andrew Wyeth

"To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me. If I have an emotion, before I die, that's deeper than any emotion that I've ever had, then I will paint a more powerful picture that will have nothing to do with just technique, but will go beyond it." - Andrew Wyeth

"Painting is a mode of organizing perception rather than describing something."- Wolf Kahn

"The root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between and all that is important, all that is sacred." - Peter London - No More Second-Hand Art

"Art is prayer - not the vulgarized notations handed down to us in the scriptures, but a fresh vital discovery of one's own special presence in the world." - Joseph Zinker - (As quoted in No More Second-Hand Art)

"We galumph when we hop instead of walk, when we take the scenic route instead of the efficient one, when we play a game whose rules demand a limitation of our powers, when we are interested in means rather than in ends." - Stephen Nachmanovich - Free Play

"We actually receive vibrations from paintings. These vibrations emanate from colors. When we say we receive a charge from a work of art, it is not just psychological in nature. Physical properties are affecting us."- Audrey Flack- Art and Soul: Notes on Creating

"A Rembrandt self-portrait is as alive today as the day it was created. Each time we look at it, we reenact the ritual of calling it to life, the very act of which has taken place by others performing this ritual for several hundred years. Profane time and duration are suspended. The image of the painting glides through time and space, in another dimension." - Audrey Flack - Art and Soul: Notes on Creating

"Perfection is not art." - Eugene Delacroix

"Creativity exists in the searching even more than in the finding or being found. We take pleasure in the energetic repetition, practice of ritual. As play, the act is its own destination. The focus is on the process, not on the product." - Stephen Nachmanovich- Free Play

"First, the true artist does not attach such intense importance to natural form as do so many realist critics, because, for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation. For he places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves." - Paul Klee

"A work of art is the energy manifestation of the one who created it. It holds the spirit of the artist within its shapes, forms, and colors." - Audrey Flack - Art and Soul: Notes on Creating

"The Muse is a living voice, as each of us experiences it, of intuition. Intuition is a synaptic summation, our whole nervous system balancing and combining multivariate complexities in a single flash. It's like computation; not while computation is a linear process, going from A to B to C, intuition computes concentrically. All the steps and variables converge on the central decision-point at once, which is the present moment."- Stephen Nachmanovich - Free Play

"Grunewald spent years of his life on the Iseheim Alterpiece. Matisse's art appears to materialize in a moment. Only the appropriation and major shifts in the usage of time are different. The length of time it takes to make a work does not necessarily make it good. Conversely, the sponaneous and rapid production of a work does not make it good. Supremacy in art lies outside the realm of countable time." - Audrey Flack - Art and Soul: Notes on Creating

"Water conforms to whatever circumstances it's in. Water in a river rushes along, but if it comes to a rock, it flows around it.... By the same token, creativity is a kind of responsiveness to circumstances. A person who is deeply responsive to the conditions in which he finds himself will be very creative." - Kenneth Kraft

"We think of practice as an activity done in a special context to prepare for the performance or the 'real thing.' But if we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real." - Stephen Nachmanovich - Free Play

"An art like painting is itself a language-a language of form and color in which complex intuitions are expressed. The necessity for the plastic symbols of the art of painting is to some extent dictated by the inadequacy of our linguistic means of communication. To explain art, therefore, is often an effort to give words to nameless processes, to actions otherwise confined to instinctive gestures" - Paul Klee

"Not a day without a line." - Adolph Menzel

"Perception is no primary phase of consciousness: it is an ulterior function acquired by a dream which has become symbolic of its own external conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny.... Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired: their status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of imagination happily grown significant.... In imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of experience, while science and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form." - Santayana - Little Essays: The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men

"So I could only suppose that, in one part of the mind, there really could be a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; particularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact a fear of being mad. This same fear was to appear again in connection with the imaginative perception of action in nature, the fear that letting in imaginative perception of action in nature, the fear that letting go common sense appearances and letting in imagination meant letting in madness. I wondered, perhaps this was one reason why new experiments in painting can arouse such fierce opposition and anger. People must surely be afraid, without knowing it, that their hold upon reason and sanity is precarious, else they would not so resent being asked to look at visual experience in a new way, they would not be so afraid of not seeing the world as they have always seen it and in the general publicly agreed way of seeing it." - Marion Milner - On Not Being Able to Paint

"Painting is an art, and art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvment and refinement of the human soul, in fact, to the raising of the spiritual triangle." - Wassily Kandinsky - Concerning the Spiritual in Art

"I want to reach that state of condensation which makes a painting. I might be satisfied with a work done at one sitting, but I would quickly tire of it; therefore, I prefer to rework it so that later that I may recognize it as represenative of my state of mind. There was a time when I never left my paintings hanging on the wall because they reminded of moments of over-excitement and I did not like to see them when I had again become calm." - Henry Matisse

"When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really supress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing." - Pablo Picasso

"When I no longer try to 'organize', 'compose', 'express', what I see, but let that which my eye perceives express itself through my hand, rose bush and apple orchard become self-aware in me." - Frederick Franck - The Awakened Eye

"Intellectual understanding is to the intuition as movement is to rest, acquiring is to having, and as becoming is to being. The intuitive function is therefore more complete than the intellectual function. However, with human thought intellectual understanding is the usual mode of operation. This is because man is not pure spirit, but a spirit that is very closely bound to the body." - Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle - The Practice of Zen Meditation

Individual existence is the object of intellectual understanding, and undivided existence itself is the object of intuition. That is why intellectual understanding deals primarily with the physical element of being and the intuition with the spiritual element of being, in particular the highest absolute being... In practical terms this would mean, that intellectual understanding of the thing perceived is not yet a complete understanding of it." - Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle - The Practice of Zen Meditation

"Whatever meaning a painting has is the accumulated meaning of a thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted." - Robert Motherwell

"Draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will always be well worth while, and will do you a world of good." - Cinnino Cellini

"Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean to simply reproduce contours; drawing does not consist of merely line; drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. Drawing includes three-and-a-half quarters of painting. Drawing contains everything, except hue. One must keep right on drawing, draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil." - Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

"You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day; without that, there's no point in working." - Edgar Degas

"Perfection is not art. I have told myself a hundred times that painting- that is to say, the material thing called painting- was no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator. Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself. The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of the painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could do it, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas as the front."- Eugene Delacroix

"Those who are compelled to paint by force, without being in the necessary mood, can produce only ungainly works, because this profession requires an unruffled temper." - Titian

"Paintings are but research and experiment." - Picasso

"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. Even working from life, you must compose. Some people think it is forbidden!" - Edgar Degas

"Drawing is like studying Greek and piano- you can't speak or play in your conscious, which is clumsy. You must get it into your subconscious, which is graceful. But that takes time." - Robert Beverly Hale

"Painting isn't so difficult when you don't know.... But when you do, it's quite a different matter!" - Edgar Degas

"To seize and render a subject by photography rather than from nature, it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is you will see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything." - Eugene Delacroix

"It is very good to copy what one sees; it is even better to draw what you can't see anymore but in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and the memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say, the necessary. That way, your memories and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny of nature. This is why pictures made in such a way, by a man who has a cultured memory and knows the old masters and his craft, are almost always remarkable works- look at Delacroix.' - Edgar Degas

"The study of painting is toilsome and the further one advances into it, the more difficulties appear, and the sea grows larger and larger." - Tintoretto

"For my part, I have never permitted myself to be revolutionary, I have always believed that I can only continue that which others have done much better before me." - Auguste Renoir

"Drawing and delineating are two quite different things, you must never confuse them." - Edgar Degas

"Study line.... draw lots of lines, either from memory or from nature." - Ingres (Spoken to Degas)

"The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes in drawing, the sooner you will be able to correct them." - Kimon Nicolaides

"To imagine a composition is to combine elements one knows with others that spring from the inner being of the artist. Then from a well stored memory, forms are brought to an apparent reality." - Eugene Delacroix

"The air you breath into a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors." - Edgar Degas

"Perfection in a work of art is no criterion of real value because technical perfection is only standard on which there can be an agreement; Creative thought, breadth of understanding and its communication to others, is something which cannot be measured." - John Sloan

"Whatever his apparent subject, it is always himself that the artist paints. The subject merely exalts his inner feelings." - Eugene Delacroix

"The Avant-Gaurdists are opportunists who seek only to shock, they are a rabble of pretenders who generate fads for their own dubious, too worldly puposes. There is no hope of reconciling these opposed notions of modernity." - Anonymous Artist

"Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." - Picasso

"No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, and temperament... I know nothing." - Edgar Degas

"It is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times." - Edgar Degas

"What ferments in that head is terrifying." - Rene de Gas of his brother, Edgar Degas

"Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character." - Auguste Renior

"Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters." - Ingres - (Spoken to Degas)

"When an artist.... softens the grimace of pain, the shapelessness of age, the hideousness of perversion, when he arranges nature- veiling, disguising, tempering it to please an ignorant public- then he is creating ugliness because he fears the truth. To any artist worthy of a name, all in nature is beautiful because his eyes, fearless and accepting all exterior truth, read then, as in an open book.... all the inner truth." - Rodin

"You wrote that there is a rather simple old fellow who has an Academy but is rather lax in running it. This would be just right, for, let me repeat, I fear Legros has a preconceived method." - Camille Pissarro - written to his son Lucien

"One must copy and recopy the masters, and it is only having given every proof of being a good copyist that permission could resonably be given to paint a radish from life." - Edgar Degas

"Look for the kind of nature that suits your temperament. The motif should be observed more for shape and color than for drawing. There is no need to tighten the form which can be obtained without that. Precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of the whole; it destroys all sensations. Do not define too closely the out line of things; it is the brushstroke of the right value and color which should produce the drawing. In a mass, the greatest difficulty is not to give the contour in detail, but to paint what is within. Paint the essential charachter of things, try to convey it by any means whatsoever, without bothering about technique." - Camille Pissarro's advice to a young painter

"There are people who always talk about the Masters; when they frequent them it is always to try and rob them. They don't understand them, they use them and they dishonor them. The secret is to follow the advice given by the Masters in their work by doing something other than what they have done." - Edgar Degas

"For my part, I have never permitted myself to be revolutionary, I have always believed that I can only continue that which others have done much better before me." - Auguste Renior

"I can see no harm in drawing the nude, the figure, if you are permeated with the idea of not following Legros in the field of Greek theory, and are resolved not to seek formulas, not to be influenced by apt pupils, not to fix the proportions in advance, in a word if you can learn to see for yourself and to draw relying on a ready made system.... I mentioned to Degas that you are thinking of taking Legros' course in drawing. Degas says that there is one way of escaping Legros' influence, the method is simply this: it is to reproduce, in your own place, from memory, the drawing you make in class. I suppose you begin by making a sketch of the whole figure; when you get home you prepare your sketch and try to do it again from memory what you did from natur... The drawing will have art - it will be your own - this is a good way of escaping slavish imitation." - Camille Pissarro - written to his son Lucien

"One must detect and capture the artifices of the Great Masters, but shrug off all restraint in front of nature and represent it solely by one's own inspiration." - Augusta de Gas - (Degas' father)

"Art, is not about what you can see, but what you can make others see." - Edgar Degas

"To draw the figure, you have to know anatomy. You need four or five months of work at the academy as a start; the thing to do is to discontinue when the weather gets better and then to go back in the winter. If you could go just in the morning, that wouldn't be bad. When I went I did so only at night so that I could paint during the day." - Camille Pissarro - written to his son Lucien

"Do portraits of people in their familiar, typical postures, above all give their face the same range of expressions as one givess their body. So if a smile is typical of the person, make them smile." - Edgar Degas

"Degas makes war on drawing with the weapons of a draughtsman." - Jules Clatretie

"What concerns us here is the whole question of knowledge of works of art. Only those who can rise to the level of the artist can communicate with him. Their number is, of necessity, limited. Then why are the museums thrown open to a largely ignorant public? The best way to learn a foriegn language is to go to the country where it is spoken and hear it. The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors there is even one whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums." - Auguste Renior

"One must contrive to give the impression of nature by false means; but it must appear true." - Edgar Degas

"Degas is a curious observer who looks for himself and sees things others have never seen." - Charles Bigot

"Art does not expand, it repeats itself." - Edgar Degas

"Someone gave a picture by one of the great masters to one of my friends, who was delighted to have an object of undisputed value in his drawing room. He showed it off to everyone. One day he came rushing in to see me. He was overcome with joy. He told me naively that he never understood until that morning why the picture was beautiful. Until then he had always followed the crowd in being impressed only by the signature. My friend had just become a sensualist." - Auguste Renior

"The artist, in representing the universe as he imagines it, formulates his own dreams. In nature, he celebrates his own soul. And so he enriches the soul of humanity. For in coloring the material world with his rich spirit he reveals to his delighted fellow beings a thousand unsuspected shades of feeling.... He gives them a new reason for loving life, new inner lights to guide them." - Rodin

"Make a drawing, begin it again, trace it; begin it again, and trace it again." - Edgar Degas

"Everything that I call grammer on primary notions of Art can be summed up in one word: irregularity. The earth is not round. An orange is not round. Not one section of it has the same form or weight as another. If you divide it into quarters, you will not find in a single quarter the same number of pips as in any of the other three; nor will any of the pips be exactly alike. Take a leaf of a tree-take a hundred thousand other leaves of the same kind of tree-not one will exactly resemble the other." - Auguste Renoir

"I accentuate the lines which best express the spiritual state that I interpret... I accentuate the muscles which express distress.... I have exaggerated the straining of the tendons which indicate the outburst of prayer." - Rodin

"Aren't all beautiful thing made by renunciation?" - Edgar Degas

"I recognize fully that you cannot draw well, my dear Lucien. I told you any number of times that it is essential to have known forms in the eye and in the hand. It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character. Don't despair. If you could work evenings in the free art schools where there are nude models you would make progress." - Camille Pissarro - written to his son Lucien

"I tackle things seriously and will not let myself be forced to give to the world work that does not show my own character." - Vincent Van Gogh

"I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate." - Vincent Van Gogh