L'ATELIER ROBERT COANE
- ARTQUOTES -
ALWAYS ADDING...
...words of advice, encouragement, admonishion, pride and precaution from
Masters, Critics, Dealers, Historians, Authors, Collector
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on
Being an Artist / Learning & Teaching / Creativity / Drawing / Painting / Photography

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rtists who are fond of reading invariably derive the greatest benefit from their studies ... Book learning encourages craftsmen to be inventive in their work; and certainly, whatever their natural gifts, their judgement will be faulty unless it is backed by sound learning and theory ... But everyone knows, too, that when he is at work the artist himself must decide after careful consideration what to reject and what to acaccept, using his own judgement and not relying on the theories of others, which are rarely of any value when divorced from practice.

When theory and practice coincide, then nothing could be more fruitful, since artistic skills are enhanced and perfected by learning and the advice and writings of knowledgeable artists carry more weight and are more efficacious than the words or work of those who are merely practical men."
~ Giorgio Vasari


DINTENFASS
COOKE
MICHELANGELO
VARGAS LLOSA
BACON
CARAVAGGIO
KRAMER
LEONARDO
HUGHES
RIVERA
KAHLO
EISENSTEIN
LANDIS
FEIGEN
CASANOVA
WILDE
MOTHERWELL
TINTORETTO
LEGROS
BARYE
KIMMELMAN
CAPP
SHAW
WHISTLER
HEPWORTH
UNSWORTH
JOBS
PRIOROV
VOGEL
HUYSMANS
DOSTOEVSKY
PHILLIPS
OPIE
PLAZA
GOETHE
GAUGUIN
CAVETT
KLEIN
ROTHKO
REEVE
RODIN
SCHUMANN
MIES
VAN DER ROHE
MATTHEWS
DE GONCOURT
PETTINGER
CISNEROS
DAVIS
DE GONCOURT
NOLDE
RIVERS
SCHMIDT-ROTTLUFF
EDWARDS
BRESSON
BECKMANN
VAN GOGH
DAVIES
GIACOMETTI
EAKINS
VASARI
MIRÓ
GREENBERG
GOMBRICH
MATTISE
KANDINSKY
PICASSO
ROBB
GOLUB
KRUGIER
PEREZ-REVERTE
BRETON
KERTESZ
SCHIFF
ANGELOU
KLEE
BELL
WOLFE
MERKLE RILEY
FREUD
VUILLARD
MATTERA
JOHNS
WATERHOUSE-HAYWARD
DEGAS
CLARK
GOYA
REINHARDT
DUCHAMP
POLLOCK
BRAQUE
CHEVALIER
SAINT-GAUDENS
ROBERTSON
MURRAY
SWEETMAN
DE KOONING
MOSKOWITZ
DENIS
JAMES
PORTER
BLAKE
PEARS
MALLARMÉ
DUGAN
GAUDIER-BRZESKA
EL GRECO
HODGKIN
TURNER
CAPOTE
APOLLINAIRE
DELACROIX
ACHACOSO
COANE
WRIGHT
QUEEN MARIE
NIN
BLAKE
COTTINGHAM
STRAND
EINSTEIN
BOUCHER
REMBRANDT
WRIGHT
TONEY
LEE
NIETZSCHE
HEPBURN
MENCKEN
GLUECK
H. MILLER
VASARI
BERNHARD
McNEIL
DE SADE
BROOKS
ELKINS
COTTER
HERBERT
MYATT
MEIER-GRAEFE
BELLOC
FLAUBERT
JOHNSON
GRIMES
DE MONTAIGNE
CHILDS
BONNARD
WEBER
SPINOZA
DUNANT
THOMSON
LEWIS
ARMITAGE
NICHOLSON
FRANKLIN
VALÉRY
POINCARÉ
DOWD
THURSTON
WEIL
BROAD
SHAWN
PIRSIG
BULWER-LYTTON
MAHER
HARDY
DARROW
BENJAMIN
YEATS
RHEIMS
RIKLEEN
AUSTEN
SMITH
JUNG
TWAIN
BRODSKY
ARISTOPHANES
KLINKENBORG
O'HAGAN
CHRISTOPHER
ROUSSEAU
EDITORIAL
HENRI
RHEIMS
ERWITT
BECKETT
PROSE
COLLINS
FISCHL
CHESTERTON
LEOPOLD II
of BELGIUM
COLLIER
BORSHEIM
BERGER
RENOIR
ROBERT
BRESSON
CORLISS
LAUDER
HOWARD
OLIVEIRA
MAILLOUX
ERLEBACHER
CONANT
WATT-COULTIER
BRAQUE
WESTON
PAULA
BROOKS
WATERHOUSE-HAYWARD
HUMPHREY
BAKUNIN
SCOTT MILLER
CARY
ZOLA
BRANDT
RUBENS
GARNETT
DERRY MOORE
 
HITCHENS
POE
AUTH
CASEY
ACKROYD
SCHUMANN

"book of quotations can never be complete."
~ ROBERT M. HAMILTON

Q


ON BEING AN ARTIST


On the Death of Elizabeth Murray
"There are so many separations in every artist’s life — the projects that live only in the mind,
the ones that go no further than a few sketches and, of course, the divorce that takes place
when a work is really and truly finished and begins to live on its own. For those of us who

celebrated the life and work of Elizabeth Murray, who died of cancer on Sunday at age 66,
we mourn our separation from both.

"Her paintings will be with us for years and years to come, teasing us, resisting us, giving life to
something in her that could only find expression in an almost erotic sense of color and shape.
People will come upon her work and wonder about the woman who made it, and she will take
the place that every artist eventually takes — overshadowed by the constructs of her imagination.

" But we — many of us New Yorkers — have been lucky to have known the woman herself.
I have never met anyone in whom frankness and delicacy combined in the way they did in Elizabeth.
Her eyes were very bold, and her face seemed constructed to make sure you couldn’t miss that boldness.
There was a wildness blowing through her, and to talk to her was to feel that she was consciously effacing,
for your benefit, something that would unhinge you if she let it out, which she did in her work.
That was before cancer.

"And if you happened to see her in the past year, frail and bald and as direct in the eye as ever,
you knew that there was no effacing the knowledge of death, or the fresh understanding of life
that that knowledge gives.

"Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the toolsshe chose. It was central to her idea of herself, and yet the reference it makes to the living woman will now become more and more oblique. The work will live on in the durable world.

But the memory of the artist lives on only in us,
who are made of the same impermanent stuff that she was."



~
VERLYN KLINKENBORG

14 August 2007

• • •

"It's a disease -- being an artist. They cannot do anything other than what they are doing." ~ TERRY DINTENFASS
“Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.” ` JOYCE CARY

“There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.”
~ EMILE ZOLA

"It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist. The special quality which makes an artist of him might almost be defined, indeed, as an extraordinary capacity for irritation, a pathological sensitiveness to environmental pricks and stings. He differs from the rest of us mainly because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner to phenomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or, at most, merely annoy us vaguely. He is, in brief, a more delicate fellow than we are, and hence less fitted to prosper and enjoy himself under the conditions of life which he and we must face alike. Therefore, he takes to artistic endeavor, which is at once a criticism of life and an attempt to escape from life.

"So much for the theory of it. The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot."

~ H.L. MENCKEN

“Our job is not to amuse our readers. Our mission is to stir them, inform and inflame them. Our task is to continually
hold up our government and our leaders to cleareyed analysis, unaffected by professional spin-meisters and agenda-pushers. In these times, when those of us who are members of the ‘reality-based community’ are under relentless attack from both the right and the left, we must encourage, and our work must reflect, independent and nonideological thinking.”

~ TONY AUTH

"I have a compulsion to paint, or draw, or paste, or form, or combine, or twist, or scratch, or scrape, stamp,
or glue or more, if I discover how.... I must work hard; though well into my eighth decade, I am still a young painter
and feel the need to make up for all the years I spent doing other necessary things." ~
REBECCA RIKLEEN

"Nobody makes you do it." ~ GEORGE McNEIL

"Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm." ~ ROBERT SCHUMANN

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist." ~
ROBERT SCHUMANN

"The artist is a blessing unto others-a curse unto himself." ~ CARL JUNG

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed
with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him." ~
CARL JUNG

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will,
they soon become inevitable." -
Christopher Reeve

"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known." ~ OSCAR WILDE

"Few people know how to see, to see well, to see fully." ~ PIERE BONNARD

"In whatever one does, there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart. One must come to one's subject
in a pure spirit. One must be strict with oneself. There must be time for contemplation, for reflection about the world
and the people about one." ~
HENRI CARTIER BRESSON

"Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life." ~ GOETHE

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." ~ SUSAN ERTZ

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." ~ ALBERT EINSTEIN

"Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men."
~
BARUCH SPINOZA

" None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not." ~ BARUCH SPINOZA

"A lover of solitude, he nevertheless surrounded himself with with admiring friends." ~ WILLIAM GRIMES

"Just before his death, he [Michelangelo] burned a large number of his drawings, sketches and cartoons
to prevent anyone from seeing the labours he endured ... for fear that he might seem less than perfect." ~
GIORGIO VASARI

"I am an artist. I am afflicted." ~ TRACY LEE

"Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty, concur in maintain
that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination--sculpture, painting, written fiction--is so purely in the imagination,
that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth."
-
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

“Even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if
I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.” -
Thomas Hardy

"I want to be an artist, that's all." - Eugene O'Neil

"Historically, artists possess a critical and discerning intellect with the ability to see through layers of illusion
to the underlying truth." -
C. J. Collins

"It's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown." - Edgar Degas

"I'm not an actor. What does it mean, 'celebrity'? I call myself an 'artisan'. Anyone with sensitivity is potentially an
artist. But then, you must have concentration besides sensitivity." -
Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Painting for me is a compulsive act. The only things that break its continuity are other compelling necessities,
such as writing, housekeeping, meetings and teaching." -
Anthony Toney

"Some artists are destined to endure the hazards of ' interesting times' ." - Hilton Kramer

"Symptoms of the artistic temperament should be fought to the death." - David Graham Phillip

"Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman."- Guillaume Apollinaire

"[Art is] an attempt to escape from life." - H. L. Mencken

"Nor do I think that artists can necessarily be held to the standards of decorum of historians." - Diana Wright

"Dealings with artists, for instance, require great prudence; they are acquainted with all classes of society,
and for that reason dangerous; they are hardly ever satisfied, and when you have too much to do with them,
you are sure to have des ennuis."
~ King Leopold of Belgium to Queen Victoria

"Well, art makes an interesting life. Sometimes we paint; sometimes we don't. But we never stop seeing the world
through artist eyes; never stop processing information through an artist brain.."
- Joanne Mattera

"I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring." - James McNeil Whistler

"Great art is always about human nature." - Michael Kimmelman

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." ~
Oscar Wilde

"Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait."
- Lucian Freud

"Describe not the object itself but the effect it produces." - Stéphane Mallarmé

"Color has taken hold of me. I don't have to try to capture it. It will posses me always.
That is the meaning of this happy hour. I know it. Color and I are one. I am a painter." -
Paul Klee

"The painter should be solitary and consider what he sees and speak with himself,
choosing the most excellent parts of everything he sees. he should be as a mirror and
change himself into as many colors as there are in the things that appear in front of him.
In doing so he'll seem to himself a second nature." -
Leonardo

"Do not defend your [art]. This is your chance to sit back and to observe what [viewers] make of your [work].
It is not the time to tell them that they have misunderstood it or to otherwise try to defend it.
In the “real” world, you will not be able to follow your [art] around and explain it or answer criticism.
If [viewers] do not understand what you have [done], you need to ask yourself whether that is because
they are weak [viewers]... or whether it is because there is something in your work that is confusing,
unclear or just plain mistaken. While you cannot really control [viewers], you can make your [artwork] clearer,
easier to read and more persuasive without sacrificing integrity. In the process, you will become a better [artist]."
-
Michael Pettinger

"I make little claim to being an artist in the romantic sense of that mauled and blurred word. I am a fine craftsman."
~
Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"The artist's world is limitless. it can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep." -
Paul Strand

"The consummate artist conjures up the imageof a human being that will live on in the richness of its
emotional texture when the sitter and his vanities have long been forgotten." -
E.H. Gombrich

"Los artistas son personas complicadas, no tienen que ser unos santos. No hay que idealizarlos. Importan sus obras, no sus vidas." -
Mario Vargas Llosa in Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto

"One's mind is the world. Those who give expression to it are what we call artists."
-
J. D. Landis in Longing

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." ~
Edgar Allen Poe

"To create a work of art is to create the world." - Wassily Kandinsky

“I want to go out and see if I can just forget about art and art history and go out with a brush and try to do some honest painting.” - John Myatt

"Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye."
- Lucian Freud

"Art is the expression of experiences and discoveries meaningful to humanity." - Anthony Toney

"So may night continue to fall upon the orchestra, and may I, who am still searching for something
in this world, may I be left with open or closed eyes, in broad daylight, to my silent contemplation."
-
Andre Breton

"My greatest obstacle has always been me." - Robert Coane

"I refuse to adapt or integrate myself." - Imre Kertesz

"One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one." -
Imre Kertesz

"Blessed are the artists who, owing to family history, innate talent and an indomitable will,
are born to their vocation. What a lot of false starts, wasted energy and deferred achievement
they are spared!" -
Hilton Kramer

"There are men whom nature has made small and insignificant but who are so fiercely consumed by emotionand ambition that they know no peace unless they are grappling with difficult or indeed almost impossible tasksand achieve astonishing results." -
Giorgio Vasari on Brunelleschi

"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good." - Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

"The artist must try to raise the level of taste of the masses, not debase himself to the level of unformed and impoverished taste." -
Diego Rivera

"Most artists have one idea, or maybe two. In the best circumstances, that's enough for a career."
-
Michael Kimmelman

"There is service to art which goes beyond convenience." - Daniel C. Dugan

"If I were certain that all my paintings would be burned, I think I'd go right on painting -- yes, I'd go right on painting..."
~
Georges Braque

"So now he occupies a niche, like most artists worth remembering, based on only a few years' work
that nevertheless still speaks to us."-
Michael Kimmelman

"Millions of artists create; only a feware accepted or even discussed by the public,
and of those,
even fewer are consacrated by posterity."
- Marcel Duchamp

"Artists...are different from other people, they feel things more." - Barry Unsworth

"An artist at work is merely mad; an artist not at work is wholly mad." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"For some artists, not working is just a less productive, more tormented form of working." - Roberta Smith

"It is pointless to paint. It is futile to paint well." ~
Robert Coane

"But Art, my dear Cornish, is a cruel obsession, as you may yet learn."
-
Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"[Art's] what exalted you, and {art's} what cast you down." -
J. D. Landis in Longing (Paraphrased)

"He who is born with a talent for a talent finds in it his happiest exhistance." - Goethe

"How do we know we are artists? ...All one can express at any moment is himself... What if I have merely suffered as an artist but, in the end, produced nothing that might be called Art?
"
- Robert Schumann

"He is one of those curious cases of a coarse man capable of making the sweetest art, as if a hard outer shell were protection for a soft heart." - Michael Kimmelman

"I don't go along with the idea that every mark an artist makes is significant. That would be arrogant."
- Howard Hodgkin

"His art seemed dangerous to man but entailed a vulnerable openness on (Caravaggio's) part, an exquisiteness of feeling that would've had some need of social armorfor going about the ordinary business of life."
-
Peter Robb in 'M', The Man Who Became Caravaggio

"My honors are misunderstanding, pesecution and neglect, enhanced because unsought."
-
Thomas Eakins

"No man, and least of all myself, could ever disentangle the feelings that animated him."
- Thomas Eakins

"No question, Chardin was one of the greatest artists who ever picked up a brush - and all the greater for paintin without the attributes of greatness... There was nothing extraordinary about his career except the beauty of the works it produced."
- Robert Hughes on Jean-Siméon Chardin

"I am a perfectly straightforward character with all my cards on the table. But there are so many cards." - Picasso

"Anyone else will have all of my faults but none of my virtues."
- Picasso

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier you'll be a general.
If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope.'
Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."
~ Picasso

"I think art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves."
~
Francis Bacon

"To be an artist at all is a form of vanity."
- Francis Bacon


“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud!” ~
Émile Zola

"Like any monomaniac, Gauguin was in the Gauguin business, aggressively, competitively, full time... he labored to orchestrate his European reputation from several oceans away. It was a demanding job. It entailed not only creating art of extraordinary quality, but also inventing a persona with which to promote it."- Holland Cotter

"Generosity is a powerful spur to talent." - Giorgio Vasari

"Most of the Goyas we rightly regard asmasterpieces were not seen by the public in the artist's lifetime." - Robert Hughes

"In the true artist, Art and life were one." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"If you want to live as an artist - just live...just be." - Mikhail Priorov

"Rubens was a happy man of action who was also a painter of genius. Velázquez was a true professional." - Kenneth Clark

"Ars longa, vita brevis." - Latin Proverb

"An artist's time limits him." - Clifford Still

"Do not define today. Define backward and forward, spatial and many sided. A defined today is over and done with."
- Paul Klee

"The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance.
It is with the future that we have to deal.
For the past is what man should not have been.
The present is what man ought not to be.
The future is what artists are." -
Edmond De Goncourt

Art is all tied up in time. Time is its subject and its substance. Art records time, measures it, manipulates it,
invents it. Art also exists in time, is composed of it, is swallowed up in it. The idea of timeless art is sweet.
But there is no 'timeless.' And the longer a piece of art outlives its time, the more clearly it speaks of ephemerality,
what is or will be gone.” - Holland Cotter

"Talent can have an expiration date." - Michael Kimmelman

"A child, one has to be, to think that an artist is something useful." - Paul Gauguin

 

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ON LEARNING AND TEACHING


"So likewise in teaching others everything depends on consistency, for it is only through repetition that the pupil makes the material his own." ~ I CHING (The book of Changes) Hexagram 29 (K'an / The Abysmal - Water) The Image:
"Water flows on uninterruptedly and reaches its goal:
The image of the Abysmal repeated.
Thus the superior man walks in las6ting virtue
And carries omn the business of teaching.
"

"When you learn, teach; when you get, give." -
Maya Angelou


"A thorough understanding of the anatomy of the human figure in its ideal form is fundamental to relating to, and interpreting, our perception of the world." - Marvin Humphrey

"I practice; I learn; I live and breathe images." - Rebecca Rikleen

"What really separates human from ape is not the ability to talk incomplete sentences. It is our underused capacity to listen."
-
The New York Times, Editorial: We Never Really Talk Anymore, 6 August 2007

"Absorbing art's effect and grasping its meaning starts partly by deciphering the how and what of its physical particulars."
-
Roberta Smith

"I'm a teacher, I teach." - Robert Coane

"I’m the product of Classical Antiquity. What do I know?" - Robert Coane

"I want to make students aware that they come with a point of view, one that transforms what is told them and one that is relative and changing, a point of departure." - Anthony Toney

"It matters not what kind of figure-pictures he wishes to paint, he will never be able to draw the figure properly, whether draped or otherwise, unless he has gone through a preliminary course of study from the nude." - John Collier

" Before you can learn to walk on a tightrope, you must learn to walk on the ground." -
Henri Matisse

"The formal class is a stimulating extension of my work as a painter." - Anthony Toney

"The academic disciplines of art history and studio art expose students to culturally important bodies
of knowledge, train them in skills of analysis and synthesis and teach them modes of professional conduct.
But there is a deeper way art educates: like literature, music and dance, it educates the imagination and,
in so doing, deepens and refines awareness of how inert physicality may be brought to life by human touch."
-
Ken Johnson

"Ours is now an art world with a very imperfect memory of the cultural past." -
Hilton Kramer

"Who were my masters? The people in the streets and piazzas of Rome." - Caravaggio

"Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along the roads by observing the formation of the clouds, in the studio by studying the model." -
August Rodin

"Those who take for their guide anything other than nature, mistress of the masters, exhaust themselves in vain."

~ Leonardo

"To observe nature and align oneself with it; what more could one teach?"
-
Antoine-Louis Barye (Rodin's teacher)

"And genius was not something to be taught, only nurtured." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"It takes a long time to become a child." - Pablo Picasso

"The past is the basis for the future." - José Cisneros

"He made us use our powers of observation to the utmost, by accustoming us to seize upon the essential points of everything. Often he sent us to Nature, but still more often to the Louvre, where we had to make drawings, which in turn had to bew reproduced formmemory at the school." - Alphonse Legros

"Now I have given you a compass by means of which, with nature as a professor, you can steer yourself." - August Rodin


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ON CREATIVITY

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - SAMUEL BECKETT

"Talent works, genius creates." ~
ROBERT SCHUMANN

"In a world of infinite metamorphoses -- only a fraction of which we're privy to -- who can cleanly separatethe fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to?
-
Nicholas Christopher in The Beastiary

"Art isn't a contest. It's a conversation between artists, living and dead, and between artists and us, too unruly to stick to the neat scripts historians devise for it." - Michael Kimmelman

"Art is about showing and seeing: to show that which is concealed, to see what was veiled, is fundamentally gripping."- Jonathan Jones

“Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.” - Henri Poincaré

“You don’t see what you’re seeing until you see it but when you do see it, it lets you see many other things.”
~
William Thurston

“Art is all tied up in time. Time is its subject and its substance. Art records time, measures it, manipulates it, invents it. Art also exists in time, is composed of it, is swallowed up in it. The idea of timeless art is sweet. But there is no "timeless." And the longer a piece of art outlives its time, the more clearly it speaks of ephemerality, what is or will be gone.”-
Holland Cotter

"I'm working on a painting, an abstract painting, very abstract. No paint, no canvas, I just think about it."
-
Steven Wright

"If I'm painting and a clamer comes along and digs those big, dirty holes right in front of me, I truly believe that what I'm doing is just a pastiche. I really am moved when I see that his is the artwork and mine is just an impression. It always shocks me that these people come along and dig great holes and walk away from it and it looks just wonderful." - John Walker

"It is important for the student to realize that there is a process involved [in creativity] whether explained as revelation, intuition, observation or a synthesis." - Anthony Toney

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." - Anais Nin

"Art is an elegant expression of the collective unconscious." - Denis Achacoso

"Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature,--takes from nature, the selections which best
accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz. the mind and the
soul of man." -
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth;
but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the
shows of color and the curves of grace." -
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect."
-
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"It is well to remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." -
Maurice Denis

"Como un pintor...que llevara un mundo a cuestas, y de pronto una persona, una frase, una imagen fugaz, trazasen todo un cuadro en su cabeza." - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

"...art is no longer what the vulgar think it to be, that is, some sort of inspiration which comes from nowhere, which proceeds by chance, and presents no more than the picturesque externals of things. It is reason itself, adorned by genius, but following a necessary course and encompassed by higher laws."- Eugene Delacroix

"I cannot be pinned down here and now, because I live as well with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual, and still not close enough." - Paul Klee, his own epitaph.

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance. And I know of no substitution for the force and beauty of its process." - Henry James

"Art is more godlike than science. science discovers, art creates." - John Opie

"Unless the eye catch fire, God will not be seen.
Unless the ear catch fire, God will not be heard.
Unless the tongue catch fire, God wwill not be named.
Unless the heart catch fire, God will not be loved.
Unless the mind catch fire, God will not be known."

- William Blake

"You can make anything seem like anything. Picasso's a master at being able to make a face feel like a foot."
- Lucian Freud

"For a true concept of uniqueness you have to go to the artifacts of the past, to your Madonna,
for example. Human lives are expendable, Simon. Works of art are not."
- Barry Unsworth in Stone Virgin

"I make pictures." - Nikolai Klein

"It seems to be ordinary, what he's doing, but the extraordinary is everywhere." - Fairfield Porter on Vuillard

"What gives life to style is a certain disequilibrium." - Robert Hughes

"All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure." - Alberto Giacometti

"The true work of art is but a shadow of dvine perfection." - Michelangelo

I see something, find it marvelous and want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off, in the end becomes secondary." - Alberto Giacometti

"Take an object. Do something with it. Do something else with it." - Jasper Johns

"(Art is) the residue of vision." - Alberto Giacometti

"Art is the ape of nature."- Classical Dictum

“When you’re looking at the originals, you seem to be looking at copies; and when you’re looking at copies, you seem to be looking at the originals. Is it a canal side in Haarlem or is it a Van der Heyden?... The maid-servants in the streets seem to have stepped out of a Gerald Dow and appear equally well-adapted for stepping back again.” - Henry James

“…the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially andhumanly, which is just as ardent as
their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” -
Walter Benjamin

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” - Walter Benjamin

"Visual art never begins with a poetic mood or idea, but with building one or several figures, with harmonizing a few colors or tones, or with calculating spacial relationships. Whether an idea then joins in is completely irrelevant." - Paul Klee

"If there were no beginning to anything, there would be nothing to improve upon, and the final outcome would not be and so wonderfully beautiful." - Giorgio Vasari

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist." - Oscar Wilde

“...in anything I do, I don't want the viewer involved with how it was done - the curiosity about how it was made can come later...I just want the work to be another thing in the room which is discovered slowly.”
-
Robert Moskowitz

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." - George Bernard Shaw

"The painter's intellectual grasp and his technical skill can be combined to produce a masterpiece."
-
Kenneth Clark

"What is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must follow? To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally according to the laws of Nature, and must be exclussively occupied in responding to human needs."
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Where mere technique controls the day, Art will always waste away."
-
Friedrich Wieck (Clara Schumann's father)

"This isn’t art for art’s sake; it’s style for style’s sake—the distinction being a breathless deficit of substance."
- Mario Naves

"An artist who trades in trivialities should know well enough not to mess with themes that are beyond the scope of his talent." - Mario Naves

"Some of the things that have made me want to paint, other than other paintings, are: American wood and iron workof the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain-stopre fronts and taxi-cabs; the music of Bach; the poetry of Rimbeau [sic]; fast travel by train, auto and aerop[lanewhich brought new and multiple perspectives; electric signs; the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.; 5 & 10cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano and Negro jazz music in general, etc. In one way or another the quality of these things
plays a role in determining the character of my paintings."
- Stuart Davis

"...you had to know things better to forget them, to forget their names, their styles of presentation. And only by this means, this unnaming, could could the penetyration of Nature - things as they really are,the silent mysteries beyond nomenclature - really begin... What he is best at painting is things seen for theirown sake, deriving their meaning from their being, not the other way around." - Robert Hughes on Jean-Siméon Chardin


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ON DRAWING


"Whereas beautiful colors are sold in the art stores along the Rialto, drawing is only to be learned from the box of talent."
-
Tintoretto

"Into his last years, he spent days drawing at his studio near the Place des Victoirsor or in the Louvre or in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries." - Michael Kimmelman on Cartier-Bresson

"He had always carried a little sketch pad with him, consistent with his early training under Lhote. Drawing had been his first passion. So with help from artist frieds like Sam Szafran and Avigdor Arikha in Paris,he committed himself to drawingwith an enthusiasm that people around him found remarkable."
- Michael Kimmelman on Cartier-Bresson

"Drawing is a caress." - Robert Coane

"Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally." - Jacob Collins

"Drawing is a kind of universal language understood by all nations." - Benjamin Franklin

"Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools.
It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness." -
Michael Kimmelman

"Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was
the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just like people played an instrument or sang if they wanted
to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue and the time and
effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability." -
Michael Kimmelman

"Drawing promoted meditation and stillness." - Michael Kimmelman

"A sustained act of will is essential to drawing. Nothing could be more opposed to reverie, since the requisite
concentration must be continually diverting the natural course of physical movements, on its guard against
any seductive curve asserting itself." - Paul Valéry

"A good drawing is more than just a feat of hand-eye or mind-body co-ordination. It is an exemplary struggle with society and culture; at best a victory over forces that, most of the time, keep most of us from having the courage of our own originality." - Ken Johnson

"Nullus dies sine line." - "No day without drawing." - Adage

"One must always draw, draw with the eyes when one cannot draw with a pencil." - Balthus

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

"Don't draw bodies looking like a sacks of walnuts." -
Leonardo Da Vinci

"When you draw a nude, sketch the whole figure and nicely fit the members to it and to each other. Even though you may only finish one portion of the drawing, just make certain that all the parts hang together, so that the study will be useful to you in the future." -
Leonardo da Vinci

"The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise
the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath." - Giorgio Vasari

"...you must always keep drawing without interruption, both on holidays and on workdays. In this way, through long habit,good practice becomes second nature." -
Cennino Cennini

"Forget nothing; learn the trick of remembering through the hand. - Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"Artists do not learn to draw only by recording pure, uncontaminated perceptions; they also learn by imitating other artistsand then strive to make something distinctively individual out of the generic templates that they internalize."
-
Ken Johnson

"Drawing is not form. It is the way we see form." - Edgar Degas

"Drawing was his way of making something his own..."
- Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"But you must see my pictures in the other room, my sketches. They are my great works."
-
August Rodin

"Drawing has been called the chamber music of the visual arts. Just as in a musical composition for a
piano trio, say, or a string quartet, we are better able to attend not only to the separate instruments
but to the individual notes than inj a symphonic work for full orchestra,so with a drawing on paper,
our concentration is more sharply focused on the lines and other marks and touches of the artist's hand
than with the "drawing" to be disccerned in a large oil painting on canvas." -
Hilton Kramer

"Drawings place us in an intimate, almost conversational relation to the artist's sensibility. They give us
an initial profile of the artist's vision and, in certain cases, they may define the boundaries of the
expectations we bring to an artist's entire "oeuvre". -
Hilton Kramer

"For anxiety, I look at drawings." -
Jan Krugier

"I can't be myself without drawing, you see." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"Not only is the act of drawing incredibly absorbing and peaceful, but, every once in a while, I'm really pleased with the result." - Mark Robertson

"The drawing should not be considsered as something to be done first and then colored. In looking at nature we do not analyze the drawing and color separately. It is one thing and a simultaneous impression." - Stewart Davis

"Each line of a drawing, besides contributing to the final image, stands as a unique record of the artist's thoughts
at the exact moment that the lin ewas brought into existence" -
Robert Cottingham

"A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk." - Paul Klee

"Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally." - Jacob Collins


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ON PAINTING


"Painting is man's oldest conjuring trick." - Michael Kimmelman

"O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become
a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"Today no hand-made art form has the near-universal currency that painting once did." - Ken Johnson

"I always try to paint like other people and I always end up painting like myself." - Willem de Kooning

"When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't." - Lucian Freud

"Painting is no problem; the problem is what to do when you're not painting." - Jackson Pollolck

"Painting is man's oldest conjuring trick." - Michael Kimmelman

"He traffics in all manner of newfangled and oddball devices, from unlikely fabrics as painting surfaces to strange chemical brews in lieu of the usual pigments. Doing so, he somehow reaffirms the durability of painting and, not incidentaly, invents strangely beautiful pictures, the emphasis equally on strangeand on beautiful." - Michael Kimmelman on Sigmar Polke

"I read what you wrote about Derain and I know you aren't going to like my painting." - Leland Bell

"I would like the intimacy of the image against a very stark background. I want to isolate the image."
-
Francis Bacon

"What is painting but the art of expressing the visible by means of the invisible? It's made up. It is a product
entirely of the human mind. A mind has meditated to conceive it and minds must meditate to understand it."
-
Katharine Weber

"Through painting, I unravel the labyrinths of my past experience with the images and psycholocical and
ideological concepts of my time. Paintings are resolved only to point to other problems, other necessities
and resolutions." -
Anthony Toney

"The refined pleasures of the palate were one of many unorthodox ways we celebrated god" - Sarah Dunant

"Strive to make the picture a 'thing' by itself. It should be...simple and self reliant.... It should depend on
nothing outside itself for the comprehension of it by one capable of comprehension." -
Stewart Davis

"The chain of paintings becomes a visual record of my interpretations of reality, so I say that my paintings
are a kind of realism." -
Anthony Toney

"Is the subject of a picture of any significance? No -- since all visual objects have form and reflect light,
it is possible to observe the phenomena of lighted form in space in any object."
- Stewart Davis

“Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.” - Wassily Kandinsky

"The riddle lies in the flow of colors. They flame up like fiery creatures, and yet serve the design,
which can be examined as minutely as a miniature. The rich sound of the dominant chords conquers one
before there is time to examine any detail. A Veronese blue, a strawberry pink, full of sweetness of Venice
in all its tones down to the deepest claret, a yellow of golden orange to the faintest color of lemons.
A green is mixed with it like half-ripe lemons. These colors are placed there, lie there, swim next to each other,
above each other, contained by no contour. And as one approaches more closely, one sees heads, hands, breasts,
which one is tempted to look at under a magnifying glass...." -
Julius Meier-Graefe

“Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.” - Wassily Kandinsky

"For me a form is never something abstract. It is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake." - Joan Miró

"What in a curious way one is always trying to do is to paint the one picture that will annihilate al the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting." -
Francis Bacon

"My process of making a work begins by thinking over these psychological, visual, and societal contrasts
in order to generalize and to invent a particular pictorial presentation. Memory, conscious and unconscious,
of course, plays a role. Within the web of memory, one is confronted with major and minor problems of
contradiction that need to be resolved. When I feel that a particular problem has been clarified in my mind,
I am ready to make a painting." -
Anthony Toney

"The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane.''
-
Leonardo da Vinci

"If you paint a man leaning over, your own back must hurt.' - Andrew Wyeth

"Unless your picture goes wrong it will be no good." - Picasso

"The more complex paintings contain interweavings, web upon web of viual and psychological contradictions.
The simpler ones stress shape and pattern and combinations of intense colors." -
Anthony Toney

"Now this is a picture! All the others are playing cards." - Caravaggio

"Sculpture is what one bumps into when stepping back to get a better look at a painting." - Clement Greenberg

"There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certainarrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting.
- Édouard Vuillard

"Often a certain tenderness and love is felt capturing the nude's special beauty and spirit in paint. It is a romance with the subject and the canvas, and it's very seductive." - Coulter Watt

"...there was no ultimate painting, just the one he happened to do last, whichever it may have been."
-
David Sweetman re Gauguin

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ON PHOTOGRAPHY


"...a marvelous profession, while it remains a modest one." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"Photography is an instantaneous operation, both sensory and intellectual --- an expression of the world
in visual terms, and also a perpetual quest and interrogation. It is at one and the same time the recognition
of a fact in a fractionm of a second and the regorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived which
give to that fact expression and significance." -
Henri Cartier Bresson

"...the simultaneous recognitionin a fraction of a second of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"I'm not interested in my photographs nor other people's." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my
relationship to photography."
- Henri Cartier Bresson

"...approach tenderly, gentlt...on tiptoe - even even if the subject is a still life." A velvet hand, ahawk's eye -
these we we should all have."
- Henri Cartier Bresson

"Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation
that was unrolling before my eyes." -
Henri Cartier Bresson

"There is something appauling about photographing people. It is certainly some sort of violation so,
if sensitivity is lacking, there can be something barbaric about it."
- Henri Cartier Bresson

"[The automatic camera] is like shooting partridges with a machine gun." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"Shooting nudes gives us the opportunity to take chances and experiment. It's about pushing boundaries - in art and in life."
- Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

" The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?" - Edward Weston

"When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw,
I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes
which my eyes had never observed." -
Bill Brandt

"Photography was my choice of weapons." - Gordon Parks

"I love flesh. I am a photographer of the skin." - Bettina Rheims

"For better or worse, photography, film, video and digital technologies are the means by which our society talks to itself."
-
Ken Johnson


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ON RELATED DISCIPLINES


"Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous
pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving,
or music." -
Julia Child

“I was born with a reading list I will never finish.” ~ Maud Casey

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.” –
Joseph Brodsky

“To see deeply enough to capture the vibrancy of life on the page, a writer must move her consciousness out of information organizing mode into an intuitive way of seeing subtle organic connections and capturing them in bold strokes.” ~ Rachel Howard

“You write to become immortal, or because the piano happens to be open, or you've looked into a pair of beautiful eyes.”
~ ROBERT SCHUMANN

"While it is in the nature of a film industry to support war efforts, to be patriotic, to distinguish heroes from villains,
it is in the nature of art to see that everyone has his reasons." -
David Thomson

"In truth we have never cared too much whether Hollywood films are good;we only want them to sell,
and we are not famous for our sense of taste." -
David Thomson

"He often described drawing as a meditative experience, photography as intuitive, but added that 'there is no esthetic peculiar to photography or drawing.' " - Michael Kimmelman re Cartier-Bresson

"I would like to write the way I do my paintings, that is as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates, and I come up with a title long afterward." - Paul Gauguin

"Baseball is an art." - Mark Robertson

"Sometimes I think that the heavens have opened up and what has come down is color, sound and music. That is what painting is all about." -
Hans Hoffman

"A painter can learn color from a Beethoven symphony." -
J. D. Landis in Longing

"Martinis are the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet." - H.L. MENCKEN

"One can make a poem simply by aranging colors in the same way that one can also say somethingcomforting in music."
-
Vincent Van Gogh

"A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely."
-
Margaret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner

"The chef, or cook, proportions, assembles, and prepares various products of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, creating food for the epicure. The aesthetic pleasure induced by food can be so closely related to that produced by certain
music and other arts, as to defy separation or separate identification." -
Merle Armitage in Fit For A King

"Once, however, Vincent wanted to make a soup. How he mixed it, I don't know; as he mixed his colours in his pictures....
We couldn't eat it." -
Paul Gauguin

"Madness is to Art what garlic is to salads." - Augustus Saint-Gaudens

“The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure.” - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"There is no art without a poetic aim." - Édouard Vuillard

"People call me a painter of dancers but I really wish to capture movement itself." - Edgar Degas

"Drawing has been called the chamber music of the visual arts. Just as in a musical composition for a
piano trio, say, or a string quartet, we are better able to attend not only to the separate instruments
but to the individual notes than inj a symphonic work for full orchestra,so with a drawing on paper,
our concentration is more sharply focused on the lines and other marks and touches of the artist's hand
than with the "drawing" to be disccerned in a large oil painting on canvas." -
Hilton Kramer

"Drawing and dancing are branches of the same tree. Of course, they are just two varieties
of the same impulse." -
Sergei Eisenstein


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ON ESTHETICS


"I have a very simple taste, the best is just good enough!" - Oscar Wilde

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker." ~
Mikhail Bakunin

"Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting, the fact is that this hapens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if, once in a while, popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account."
~ Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco

"It is one thing to die individually or to be wiped out en masse. It is another an far more grievous thing entirely to be forced to live in a time of squalid art." -
J. D. Landis in Longing

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius." -
Oscar Wilde

"It is pointless to paint. It is even more pointless to paint well." ~
Robert Coane

“Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.” -
G.K. Chesterton

"The public glances at the art and then stampedes to the giftshop anyway. Well, what can I say? It's the same public that has come to accept sex with condoms. - Katharine Weber

“Beware of penetrating into a work of art, he said, you will ruin each and every one for yourself, even those you love most.” ~ Thomas Bernhard

"The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals."
-
H.L.Mencken

"Quality is not something you believe in. Quality is something you experience.” - Robert M. Pirsig

"Nature is much too green and poorly designed." - Françoise Boucher

"Illusionsm at this level makes criticism silly and prompts a certain knee-jerk melancholy for bygone eras of unearthly draftsmanship." - Michael Kimmelman

"...two of the characteristics of a masterpiece: a confluence of memories and emotions from a single idea, and a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive of the artist's own eppoch and yet keep a relationship with the past." - Kenneth Clark

"...that double relationship which is the prerogative of the masterpiece. It is a superb piece of design and a profound assertion of human values." - Kenneth Clark

"If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting, it should be burned for it must be bad."
-
George Brenard Shaw

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding." - Queen Marie of Romania

"There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character...only the false, the artificial is ugly in art." - August Rodin

"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." - Oscar Wilde

"I just can't seem to paint nice things." - Ivan Albright

"The more stupid it is, the more people want it." -
Daniel C. Dugan

"Idiots love angles." - Daniel C. Dugan

"Less is more." - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"The secret is knowing what to leave out." - Steve Jobs

"If we are willing to dispense a painter from giving his works the quality of beauty, any man can become a painter, for nothing is easier than to produce ugliness." -
Giacomo Casanova

"That a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit than the fact that it's about mermaids and palm trees." - Robert Hughes

"Like sport, art is an area in which elitism can display itself at a negligible cost in social harm."
-
Robert Hughes

"But since when are the arts a democracy? Perhaps the only justifiable aristocracy on earth
is that of the talented." -
Dick Cavett

"So art has become foolishly confounded with education -- that all should be equally qualified."
- James McNeill Whistler

"The great mystery facing mankind was not why all fashionable stuff was wretched but why so much wretched stuff was fashionable." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"Artistic standards were abandoned, the comfortable cult of the mediocre prevailed, and presentation became confused with substance." -
J. D. Landis in Longing

"In its most significant aspects, contemporary art is ugly...
a threat to the ordering of society and man's concept of himself." -
Leon Golub

"Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
-
Al Capp

"Separate the abilities from the disabilities. Let's see what works." - Isaac Perlman

"Intellectually, ours has in many respects become a self-lobotomized society in which the moral fatuities of pop culture are quickly made to fill the gaps left vacant by our widespread incomprehnsion of the historical past." - Hilton Kramer

"It's all part of the avalanche of sub-intellectual trash that nowadays passes for art in the museums under the banner of Conceptual Art, which, by its very nature, is wholly devoid of aesthetic interest." - Hilton Kramer

"(Diego) Rivera probably gave more to Mexico, in terms of self-knowledge and cultural pride, than any artist in its history, but he was only able to do it because he had absorbed and completely internalized the great tradition of Renaissance fresco painting which, combined with his absorption of French modernism, pre-Colombian Mexican art and living folk-art to produce the tremendous results we see on the walls of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. If you had told Rivera
that quality didn't matter, he would have laughed in your face." -
ROBERT HUGHESZ


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ON STYLES, CHOICES AND PREFERENCES



"Bonnard could not have known that young artists in the year 2006 would operate in a commonplace world of budget air travel, proliferating art fairsand museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter endless objects once and mostly never again. This...may be the biggest change in art during the last half century or so: that more and more artists make works they never expect to be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice. Culture slides into the realm of entertainment." ~ Michael Kimmelman

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy,
bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf." -
Baruch Spinoza

"I'm seeking the high seas rather than safe harbour. If I sink, you're excused from mourning me." - Gustave Flaubert

"Let every man exercise the art he knows." - Aristophanes

"Of the many mixed blessings of modern culture, art's absorption into academe is high among them, along with the influx of money, a flood of it lately spreading not only prosperity but also the corrupting aspirations of popular entertainment."
~
Michael Kimmelman

"Different approaches in painting or art generally are manifestations of different views of reality." - Anthony Toney

"A work of art should be decorative, above all." - Henri Matisse

"A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions." - Rembrandt

"For Caravaggio, light was a divine power and theatrical agent, cast onto players acting on a darkened stage;
for Rembrandt, it's a mysterious force emerging as if from inside his subjects." -
Michael Kimmelman

"It is important that you find where your heart lies because your art will surely follow."
- Hereward Lester Cooke

"Abstraction is the expression in symbols of actual experience." - Anthony Toney

"I would love to have a structure as powerful and human and deeply probing as Mondrian's, but I also have to
invent something that will accomodate the appearance of things." -
Leland Bell

"This is an invariable rule of art history: only when a painter is painting what appeals to him,
in a way that appeals to him, is there a chance of producing a worthwhile picture."
- Hereward Lester Cooke

"The question in art is not between representation and non-representation, but rather what is being represented.
This in turn determines the how and the why." - Anthony Toney


"You will never be able to alter your instinctive preferences, because they originate deep down
in the recesses of your mind and memories..."
- Hereward Lester Cooke

“I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self.
Why was that so very difficult?” -
Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade

"Abstraction can be a path to or away from that reality." - Anthony Toney

"It is fatal for you as an artist to force yourself to paint either a subject or in a style which does not come
naturally to you."
- Hereward Lester Cooke

"I paint self portraits because I am alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo

"Have the courage of your convictions and paint what and how you like." - Hereward Lester Cooke

"...her art refusing, like all art, to conform to the clichés and predisposed interpretations of ideologues."
-
Michael Kimmelman

"If you climb onto a bandwagon, you will always be painting second hand and, probably, second rate pictures."
-
Hereward Lester Cooke

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." ~ Oscar Wilde

"There is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture." - David Brooks

"But I must warn you: don't try to fake the modern manner if it isn't right for you. Find your legend. Find your myth."
~ Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"Form and subject are one. If form predominates...there is a loss of vitality and of that humanity that should underlie even the most idealized construction; but if the subject predominates, the mind release its hold. In both cases the chance of a masterpiece is deminished." - Kenneth Clark


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ON THE STUDIO AND WORK ETHIC

 

"If you want to penetrate the mind of an artist, you must visit him in his studio." - Robert Schumann

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work." - Emile Zola

"Thirty-three years later, he still works full time as a photographer. 'Oh, I have to.' he said, looking at me in surprise."
~
Daisy Garnett on Derry Moore

"No, no, no. I just don't drink during the day. I try to postpone it till as late in the evening as possible these days.
So, for example, now I'll try to work till 9pm, and then drink." ~ PETER ACKROYD

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens
and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having
my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”
~
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS


"He came from nothing to something by doing nothing." -
Maureen Dowd

"All art is necesarily an abstraction. But if a work is to be socially constructive or individually significant, it must stem from and return to substantial experience." - Anthony Toney

"There are artists...who are as much the authors of their millieux as of their work. To visit (the) studio he occupies...is not in itself an 'aesthetic' experience, but its peculiar qualities reveal something crucial about the psychic image and the sense of human possibility which will also be found in the art which is made there." - Hilton Kramer

"I am never alone." - Henri Matisse in old age refering to the images in his studio.

"There is no such thing as inspiration, only regular work." - Francis Bacon

"Go on working freely and furiously and you will mmake progress." - Paul Gauguin

"Here in the studio, I work on half a dozen paintings and I am drawing and thinking about my course,
everything together. For it has to go together. Otherwise, it wouldn't work at all." -
Paul Klee

"...walls were always covered with an erndless array of poetry and light." - Mark Rothko

"Work, work, whether you want to or not. I throw away a whole day's work sometimes, but the simple effort of turning it out has kept my steam up and kept me from lagging."
- David Graham Phillips

"Shut up and paint." - Robert Coane

"The smalest thing, werll done, becomes artistic." - William Matthews

"I never took up smoking - I think because I wanted to avoid being distracted for so much as a minute."
- August Rodin

"He turned night into day and with tremendous fervor spent all his time on the study of his profession. He made a habit of this, his only pleasure was always to work hard on his craft and always to be painting."
- Giorgio Vasari on Perugino

"Live by working." - August Rodin

"He rises at seven, enters his atelier at eight, and interrupts his work only for lunch, then continues until nightfall, working on his feet or perched on a stool, which leaves him totally worn out at night, and ready for bed after an hour of sleeping."
-
Jules de Goncourt on Rodin

"A woman artist is not deprived by cooking or having children...one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day, even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one's mind." - Barbara Hepworth


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ON CHANCE


"Just as there are many who are helped by Fortune and are not endowed with much talent, so on the contrary there are countless talented men who are persecuted by hostile and contrary Fortune. Thus it is an open secret that her children are those who are not helped by talent but depend on her; for she likes to raise by her favor some who would never win recognition through their own merits."
- Giorgio Vasari

"Easy or automatic solutions rarely embody discoveries, but rather stem from well worn habit patterns.
Learn to welcome accidents or obstacles and even failure as means toward discovery." -
Anthony Toney

"One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard in order to benefit others and make his own name and then be prevented by sickness, or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun."
- Giorgio Vasari on Piero della Francesca

"I think the rarest thing now when I go to places is to be surprised." - Derry Moore

"I feel that anything I've ever liked at all has been the result of an accident on which
I've been able to work." -
Francis Bacon

"The accidents which are most fruitful tend to happen at the time of greatest despair about how to go on with a painting."
-
Francis Bacon

"If anything ever does work in my case, it works from that moment when consciously I don't know what I'm doing."
-
Francis Bacon

"I go from this to that, and why be ashamed of it? It seems to me that this is the human experience."
- Larry Rivers

"Art happens." - James McNeill Whistler

 

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ON THE FIGURE


"The nude alone is well dressed" ~ Auguste Rodin

"Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages." ~ Auguste Rodin

"I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god." ~ Auguste Rodin

"The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning."
~ Auguste Rodin

"And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed?"
~ Michelangelo

"There is nothing as humbling as drawing, sketching, painting the human body. Young, old, middle aged, it is such a thing of beauty and wonder."
- Mary Jean Mailloux

"Naked I came out of my mother's womb and naked I shall return thither."
- Job 1:21

"Figures must have their own light. It wasn't light that struck the figure in a certain way - the light, the luminosity of white, was in the figure. It emanated from the paint itself." - Nathan Oliveira

"Art can never exist without Naked Beauty display'd." - William Blake

"Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?"
- Richard Corliss

"A painter is not intellectual when, having painted a nude woman,
he leaves in our minds the idea that she is going to get dressed again right away." - Odilon Redon

"No beauty does she lack when all her clothes are on but beauty itself she is when all her clothes are gone."
- Hindu Proverb

"To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself."- John Berger

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress." - John Berger

"The nude portrait is only incidentally about the naked person in the middle of the room." - Paula Brook

"The nakedness of woman is the work of God." - William Blake

"The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become
part of our imaginative experience."
- Kenneth Clark

"There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body."
- Robert Henri

"I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver." - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

"My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit." - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

"Oil paint was made for depicting flesh." - Willem de Kooning

"I love flesh. I am a photographer of the skin." - Bettina Rheims

"My nudes are done, which is to say that the bodies benerath the draperies are done... You see, it is the part one doesn't see, the most important part, which is finished." - Auguste Rodin

"I'm in the habit of sculpting my marble children first without clothes... Later I only have to throw a cloth over them and everything vibrates at the points where it touches the body; thus the figure is made of flesh and blood, not a cold effigy."
- Auguste Rodin

"Throughout the history of Western art, the human body has been the touchstone of an artist's drawing ability. It is the most difficult subject he can hope to interpret and, if he can draw a good nude, he can draw anything."
- Hereward Lester Cooke

"Modern pessimism denies the intrinsic beauty and replaces it with a subjective vision that cares little for the objective truth.
In this thought the figure, whether nude or clothed, loses its form by putting more value on its symbolism than its actual form.
That's when you need a Rembrandt to step in a remind us of the value of content in its relation to form and beauty!"

- Shane Conant

"I don't like a long study of casts, even of the sculptors of the best Greek period. At best, they are only imitations,and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of nature itself." - Thomas Eakins
 
"The Greeks did not study the antique: the Theseus and Illyssus, and the draped figures in the Parthenon pediment were modeled from life, undoubtedly. And nature is just as varied and just as beautiful in our day as she was in the time of Phidias." -
Thomas Eakins

"The most captivating and imaginative painter to have lived since Giotto would certainly have been Paolo Ucello, if only he had spent as much time on human figures and animals as he spent, and wasted, on the finer points of perspective."
-
Giorgio Vasari

"I have read that the ancients, when they had produced a sound, used to modulate it, heightening and lowering its pitch
without departing from the rules of harmony. So must the artist do in working at the nude." -
Antonio Canova

"The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience." -
Kenneth Clark

"Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange."-
Eric Fischl

"When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't." -
Lucian Freud

"There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body."
-
Robert Henri

"When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion."
- Henri Matisse

"And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe,
and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed." ~ Michelangelo

"He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture." -
Michelangelo

"What interestes me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through the figure that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life."
-
Henri Matisse


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ON THE MODEL

 


- Elliott Erwitt

"It's doubtful that anyone ever sat on the front stoop and vowed -- with a jingle of the charm bracelet, a wave of the sunglasses – that she was going to be a muse when she grew up. But the calling has seen better days. Recruiters would have an easier time finding a Swiss Guard. Musedom has so much lost its footing that the word barely ventures out anymore without a pair of quotation marks." ~ Stacy Schiff on Francine Prose’s THE LIVES OF THE MUSES

"He looked at me as if he were not seeing me, but someone else, or something else, as if he were looking at a painting."
-
Tracy Chevalier in The Girl With the Pearl Earring

"The problem with painting a nude... is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body." -
Lucian Freud

"In fact, both were artists of extraordinary stature, geniuses in their own right, and their patrtnership produced produced works of genius that, in all probability, neither could have created alone."

- Francine Prose from The Lives of the Muses re George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell

"The gesture must be correct. If the gesture is correct, your mind really creates the reality of the figure, and it is not necessary to hang on all the rest." -
Nathan Oliveira

"Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations. It is as if you were looking through a keyhole"
- Edgar Degas

"She was smart enough to leave them all wanting more, behaviour that illuminates two central tenets ofmusedom: sex has relartively little to do with it: longing, on the other hand, is key." - Stacy Schiff

"The muse should be as charming as she is unobtainable." - Stacy Schiff

"It is difficult to rival the combustive energy of genius and passion." - Stacy Schiff

"I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty." - Georges Braque

"The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning. The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express." - Henri Matisse

"Overjoyed at the happiness of being able to create sculpture with complete freedom as 'he'* had always wanted...needing money chiefly to pay the models 'he' always has at 'his' studio and whom he often allows to move freely, though 'he' watches them out of the corner of an eye in order to learn the originality which is in nature."
~
AUGUSTE RODIN (*Rodin often wrote about himself in the third person)

"It was in the model that 'he' discovered all the strength and splendor of muscular beauty,
the equilibrium and simplcity that make the great gesture." ~
AUGUSTE RODIN

"You can't drool and draw." - Robert Coane

"Are Artists who create nude human forms getting 'turned on' while they create? Our brains are in spatial-thinking mode and conscious sexual thoughts would get in the way and defeat the intention."
- Kelly Borsheim

"She would have been a gift to the sort of painter that likes painting women getting in and out of the bath." - Barry Unsworth

"...the fatal flaw in the whole respectable edifice of the academic nude... the relationship between the painter and his model. No doubt an artist can achieve a greater degree of detachment than the profane might supose. But does this not involve a certain ... dimness of response... As a matter of history...painting the nude usually ended in fornication."
-
Kenneth Clark


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ON MORALITY AND ART

 

"Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced."
~ MARQUIS DE SADE

"Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd." -
Baruch Spinoza

“Nudity was a big part of the hippie culture, both as a rejection of the sexual repression of their parentsand also as a statement about naturalism, spirituality, honesty, openness, and freedom. The naked body was beautiful, something to be celebrated and appreciated, not scorned and hidden. They saw their bodies and their sexuality as gifts, not as 'dirty' things." -
Scott Miller

"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind." - Henry Miller

"Criticism is a queer thing. If I print, 'She was stark naked,' and then proceeded to describe her person in detail, what critic would not howl? Who would venture to leave the book on a parlor table? But the artist does this and all ages gather around and look and talk and point." - Mark Twain

"I paint a woman's big rounded buttocks so that I want to reach out and stroke the dimpled flesh." - Peter Paul Rubens

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans and seldom even ordinarily respectable." - H.L. Mencken

"Are artists who create nude human forms getting 'turned on' while they create? Our brains are in spatial-thinking mode
and conscious sexual thoughts would get in the way and defeat the intention."
- Kelly Borsheim


"Beautiful nudes made it possible for us to contemplate our sexuality in safety." -
Martha Mayer Erlebacher

"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"As two of the very few working communities in Rome, artists and prostitutes had a lot in common, not least their common intimacy with men of the cloth." - Peter Robb in 'M' The man Who Became Carvaggio

"I never met an interesting man who didn't drink." - Katherine Hepburn

"The great artist's eye is never innocent" - Robert Hughes

"Only the chaste are truly obscene." - Joris-Karl Huysmans

"Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange." - Eric Fischl

"There are no beautiful or ugly parts of the body, no noble or ignoble parts."
- August Rodin

"How could it be his fault that something about the place on his right clavicle where there is a faint spray of freckles makes me feel a harsh thump of excitement?" - Katharine Weber

"I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."
-
Baruch Spinoza

"Even when he was outrageous and pornographic, Schad remained aloof."-
Michael Kimmelman

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal." - Jane Austen

"Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created." - Paul Gauguin

"A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs." - Paul Gauguin


"People seem to be offended by facts, or what used to be called truth." - Francis Bacon

"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.
A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." -
Harold Pinter

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant." - H.L. Mencken

"When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it."
- Robert Henri

"In the Nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene." - Robert Bresson

"Art is, in short, nothing but a sexual pleasure... when he creates, the artist outwits his reproductive instinct."
~ AUGUSTE RODIN

"There should be no argument in regard to morality in art. There is no morality in nature."

~ AUGUSTE RODIN

"In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred."
~ AUGUSTE RODIN


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ON ART, WAR AND VIOLENCE IN LIFE

"Je suis Charlie"

JEAN CABUT
(Cabut)
BERNARD VERLHAC
(Tignous)
GEORGES WOLINSKI
STÉPHANE CHARBINNIER
(Charb)
PHILIPPE
HONORÉ


"The next morning I made myself go to the studio and work because, however futile it might be, it's what I do, and all I can do." - Elizabeth Murray, "Clinging to Belief in Art", New York Times, 23 September 2001

"There is nothing more American than brutal violence. The country was built on it, revels in it and shows every evidence of clinging to it with the crazed, destructive strength of an obsessive lover." ~ BOB HERBERT

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' - with his mouth." ~
MARK TWAIN

"Everything degenerates in the hands of man." - Jean Jacques Rousseau

"Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain." -
Mikhail Bakunin

"The human race had yet to render itself extinct; perhaps the animals were just adry run. Once you believed
animals were insensate things, disposable, of utilitarian vale only, it wasn't hard to move on to people."
-
Nicholas Christopher in The Beastiary

"But we should be outraged at what's going on in the world. Anger is not negative. Why shouldn't I be outraged?
Why shouldn't I be bitter and angry?" -
Julie Nicholson

"I don't like to see people suffer but, then, they breed at such a rate that they're bound to suffer." - Francis Bacon

"There is no correlation between aid and growth." - David Brooks

"My feeling in my heart a sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor. And artists who create works
of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor." -
Wallace Shawn in "Fever"

"You set out to be happy, prosperous, successful, content. But in time, lots of time, all your intentions fade away
and you become vastly closer to death than you ever were to life."
-
New York Times Editorial, Death the Supercentenarian, Tuesday, 29 August 2006

"The only world that won't disappoint me is the one I make up." - Francis Bacon

“Always trust a stranger. In this life, it’s the people you know who let you down.” - Andrew O’Hagan

"The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear -- fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.
What he wants above everything else is safety." -
H.L. Mencken

"For a young bourgeois with Surrealist ideas, breaking stone and working in a cement factory was a very good lesson."
- Henri Cartier Bresson

“Young people haven’t accomplished much yet so they can only elevate themselves by endlessly celebrating
their own superior sensibilities.” -
David Brooks

"Action has always revolted me. But when I have had to, or chosen to, I have acted decisively, quickly and well."
-
Gutave Flaubert

"Artists will certainly never win over warriors, but their existtence gives us hope." - Grace Glueck

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord wouldfully suffice.
This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality...
how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds
than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing
but an act of murder." -
Albert Einstein

"If you don't have a dog -- at least one -- there is not necessarily anything wrong with you,
but there may be something wrong with your life." -
Vincent van Gogh

"My works, those dispersed and those remaining in my studio, record my struggle for awareness and
convictions in a world full of contradictions and violence." -
Anthony Toney

"...I have been fighting for two months and I can now gauge the intensity of life." - Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
in "Written from the Trenches"

"Though I participated in two wars, never have I felt that the world is as close to disaster as it is now -
for the misuse of nuclear energy can destroy the world." -
Anthony Toney

"[the war is a] paltry mechanism, which serves as a purge to over-numerous humanity.
This war is a great remedy. In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride.
It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant unit, whose economic activities
become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us. My views on sculpture remain absolutely the same.
It is the vortex of will, of decision, that begins." -
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in Written from the Trenches

"The concept of death is explicit or implicit in all my photographs." - Manuel Álvarez Bravo

"In his work, a messy, violent, adversarial world is given order through art."
- Holland Cotter re Ni Zan (1306-1374)

"What was art was outlawed." - Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

"The paintings burn, the artists are buried, and a few more years living like a vegetable,
as though I had never exhisted as a painter." -
Emile Nolde

"If you give up the struggle, you give up what it's all about." - Robert Moskowitz

"I've never felt more generous, nor more selfish; rarely more creative, rarely more indifferent."
-
Denis Achacoso

"All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time."
-
Simone Weil

"To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped."
-
Thomas Hardy

"I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin." - William Butler Yeats

"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways,
totally worn out, shouting '...holy shit...what a ride!'" -
Anonymous

"I want my paintings to inspire a sense of optimism in the face of the seriousness of the human predicament."
-
Anthony Toney

"I suffered two great accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down....
The other accident was Diego."
- Frieda Kahlo

"El sueño de la razon produce monstruos." - Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." - Truman Capote

"Anger I reserve for people, commonly referred to as 'humans'." - Robert Coane

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
-
Baruch Spinoza

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow


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ON THE BUSINESS OF ART


"Lucky as I am, I've been able to hang on to most of my work." - Douglas Vogel

"All I am asking is that you look at my work. Tell me what you think, without lying." - Sarah Dunant

"Art promises an experience out of the ordinary but, with exhibitions commonplace and galleries selling fun
and games and almost any crazy old thing for millions, it is easy to feel spoiled or to mistake shock for awe."
-
Michael Kimmelman

"The Art market operates according to its own logic, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the art.
Value is not price -- whether the issue is a Klimt, or a ball player, or a chief executive paid millions of dollars,
who runs his company into the ground." -
Michael Kimmelman

"It's only natural to play the skeptic when the artworld is a circus of profligacy, drunk with cash,
and when dimwitted speculators make headlines, wasting fortunes on bad art." -
Michael Kimmelman

“You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused, disciplined, tenacious and willing to pay more
than you can possibly afford. Early on I decided this should be formed as a museum collection [and]
whenever I considered buying anything, I would step back and ask myself, does this make the cut?”
- Leonard Lauder

"Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture -- even the artists and rock stars are bourgeous strivers."
-
David Brooks

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
- Oscar Wilde

"Many would prefer to keep their money in art rather than in stocks and bonds." - Richard Feigen

"Art is a potent social tool. Almost magically, ownership bestows status, turns nobodies into somebodies
and makes those somebodies look classy and smart or, at the very least, rich. Yes, art is about ideals and
beauty and all that. But it is also about the power of possession, the sovereignity of taste. Deep down, it appeals
to the royalist in us all ...art becomes what it may always really be:not the potentially transformative vision
of romantic lore, but an emblem of preciousness; a badge of attainment; a collectible to have, hold and marvel at;
an enviable jewel in a fortunate somebody's crown."
- Holland Cotter

"The whole art is to write and write and writeand then offer iut for sale, just like butter." - Hilaire Belloc

"Poor artist! You have put a fragment of your soul into this canvas which you have come to sell."
- Paul Gauguin re Van Gogh

"Never was there such a load of rubbish talked about anything as has been, and will be, talked about art.
The nonsense, really, is that paintings should be priced the way they are, that a Van Gogh can go for,
what is it, $75 million? That's disgusting."
- John Myatt

"The hardest part of a painting is getting the money for it, which never gets any easier no matter how
many pictures you make." -
Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"...princely patrons are best, because they are not cheap." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"Also, always try to get an advance, even from princes." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"It's not money I'm after, it's something else. When I've found it, I'll have the money."- August Rodin

"The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself."
-
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"I don't paint for a living. That's how I live."
- Willem de Kooning

"The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist."
- Ad Reinhardt

"What is it with mothers? A genius emerged from the womb, and the mother feared
he would suffer more from lack of funds than from the stifling of his art."
- J. D. Landis in Longing

"The game is not about worldly success. The real game is between oneself and the canvas,
to end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with."

- Robert Motherwell

"He knew something about funny ways of getting a living. It was precisely from a life devoted
to such shabby expedients that he fled here from London, built up a business, became established.
It was to funny ways of getting a living that failure here would doom him to return...
Just when he was beginning to feel some confidence in his status as craftsman and businessman."
-
Barry Unsworth

"You have to use your human capital judiciously." - Orlando Plaza

"People always say congratulations. When you're a successful bidder it means you're willing to spend more
money than anyone else. I'm not sure if that's congratulations or condolences." - Eli Broad

"Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.

"More than ever, the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere is spinning out of control far above the regular workaday sphere where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by. It is a kind of fiction that has almost nothing to do with anything real — not new art, museums or historical importance. It is becoming almost as irrelevant as the work, reputation and market of the kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade.

"It has been noted once more that such figures make it impossible to see the art for the money, that works costing this much are, at least temporarily, damaged goods.

"But since the buyer is currently a mystery, it’s anyone’s guess whether we will see it again anytime soon."
-
Roberta Smith: Art Is Hard to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs

“What do these people want from me? I’m just a very quiet person. All I wanted to do was live with my pictures.
There is nothing I have loved more in my life than my pictures. They have to come back to me People only see banknotes
between these papers with paint, unfortunately.” ~ Cornelius Gurlitt


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