Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations.
I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
The power of the creative imagination is not only merely content with observing the world as it is, accepting a given reality, but is capable of creating a new reality by transforming the inner as well as the outer world
I could only relax when there was just one tiny white last spot left. I could see more clearly. I could grasp the shape of the picture again... The pictures are alive because of the white remnant, the almost concealment.
The several tribes of Indians inhabiting the regions of the Upper Missouri, and of whom I spoke in my last Letter, are undoubtedly the finest looking, best equipped, and most beautifully costumed of any on the Continent.
Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.
I hate darkness. Claude Monet once said that painting in general did not have light enough in it. I agree with him. We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it.
He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.
The degree to which the arts are included in our educational curriculum is totally inadequate. The arts are just as important as math and science in an education and just as important as any other endeavour in our lives.
Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.
When that which loves is united to the thing beloved it can rest there; when the burden is laid down it finds rest there. There will be eternal fame also for the inhabitants of that town, constructed and enlarged by him.
The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.
Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.
Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of object, meaning, and style. This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.
Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.
Let the poet dream his dreams. Yet, the poet must look at the world; must enter into other men's lives; must look at the earth and the sky, must examine the dust in the street; must walk through the world and his mirror.
What to paint was a problem for the war artist... the old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone forever... the impressionistic technique I had developed was now ineffective, for visual impressions were not enough.
Our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting into an elusive, changeable configuration, the surroundings, the artist, his work and everyone who comes to it.
It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again.
Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
I think it is such an amazing moment when people realize what they are and what they can be, and they start putting themselves out into the world. I think you can see it in people when it's happening. They look different.
What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, the modeling. See what remains after that.
Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.
The expectations of the viewer are what you're asking about. And the expectations of the viewer are manifold. However, they are very fixed, given who I am in the world. People have certain expectations of me as an artist.
I would warn very sincerely against the pitfalls of copying photographs. A frozen, split-second bears little relationship to the continuing process of living reality. It is better to look, look again, and keep on looking.
Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?
Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work... men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.
'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.
No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.
I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.
Art as a political gesture is committed to making something beautiful, and then understanding what beauty is in your own time, because what we think of as beauty changes with time. The notion of beauty everywhere changes.
Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.
People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.
Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motorbus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the bus and are blended with it.
I cannot believe that any man who deserved fame ever labored for it; that is, directly. For, as fame is but the contingent of excellence, it would be like an attempt to project a shadow, before its substance was obtained.
The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me.
Imagine a glorious full moon coming over the tops of the spruce, big and yellow, shedding a mysterious light on everything... the moonlight had colour, you could see to paint and be able to appreciate the colour of things.
I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that 'a light' can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction, that 'a blue' in different parts will play all sorts of different roles.
I do not have a philosophy about retrospectives. Of course, I cannot change what I have done. What I am doing today, this I can change, in view of whatever I have done before. My retrospectives are like a series of ghosts.
Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.
When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.
A lot of the acting students would do modeling in the arts school, so there were some gorgeous girls, but the cliché in our school was to get either the really emaciated person or the really obese person - which is stupid.
I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.
I noticed that the work of my non - I noticed that the work of my friends who were white and male, specifically, existed in a type of freedom that was not bound by certain political questions and assumptions and locations.
It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.
A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.
I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance. . . I had rather be intellectually right than emotionally exuberant.
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.