Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.
If the artist's will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.
A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.
The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.
To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.
The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.
If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.
Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.
Personal experimentation is revealing, and once you get into it, immensely engaging.
The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea
Look for echoes. Sometimes the same shape or direction will echo through the picture.
There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.
Everything depends on the attitude of the artist toward his subject. It is essential.
By my teaching I hope to inspire you to personal activity and to present your vision.
I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.
A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.
Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.
You will never draw the sense of a thing unless you are feeling it at the time you work.
It is the common defect of modern art study. Too many students do not know why they draw.
Through art mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men.
An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.
In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.
In a tree there is a spirit of life, a spirit of growth and a spirit of holding its head up.
There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.
The more simply you see, the more simply you will render. People see too much, scatteringly.
The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.
What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.
It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.
We make our discoveries while in the state [of high functioning] because then we are clear-sighted.
Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.
A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, “How did I do it?
The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.
Concentrate on a single feature - as, build all toward one eye - make all lines lead toward that eye.
To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.
Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.
Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.
There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.
I am interested in the size of your intention. It is better to overstate the important than to understate it.
Completion does not depend on material representation. The work is done when that special thing has been said.
Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.
The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.
Finished persons are very common - people who are closed up, quite satisfied that there is little more to learn
I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul
The big painter is one who has something to say. He thus does not paint men, landscape or furniture, but an idea.
Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.
Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.
Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life.