Philip Pearlstein Quotes

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

I get my highs from using my eyes.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

Each work has to be done as intensely as possible.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

Look slowly and hard at something subtle and small.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

It is what is painted between the outlines that makes the difference between merely competent painting and really meaningful art.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

Only the mature artist who works from a model is capable of seeing the body for itself, only he has the opportunity for prolonged viewing.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

There will always be those who want to make paintings of the human form with all its parts all where they should be, in spite of progress.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

I suggest that it is the honesty of the attempt to recreate the forms and spaces visually without artistic editing that is one of the hallmarks of realist painting.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

I decided that expressionism was a cheap way of getting a reaction - show anybody ripped apart, and you get sympathy. I was deliberately trying to show the human body as whole and relatively healthy.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

I try to find a compositional structure in the subject itself, in nature... I rely on the angle where the wall meets the floor as a constant reference point, and against that I oppose the movements of the model's limbs.

• Philip Pearlstein / Painter

The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete.