To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.
Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture.
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places.
All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.
Your style is the way you talk in paint.
The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.
Colors are beautiful when they are significant.
A weak background is a deadly thing.
The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.
Look for echoes. Sometimes the same shape or direction will echo through the picture.
Each sensation is precious, protect it, cherish it, keep it. Never give it away. You must develop that balance which allows all of the world to come in to you, and only that which you have expressed in your art to move back out again into the world.
The model is not to be copied, but to be realized.
Has your drawing the meaning you saw in the model at first?
Things should all be moving toward the expression of a great idea.
There has never been a painting that was more beautiful than nature. The model does not unfold herself to you, you must rise to her. She should be the inspiration for your painting. No man has ever over-appreciated a human being.
The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.
I paint for the sole purpose of magnifying the privilege of being alive.
Strokes carry a message whether you will it or not. The stroke is just like the artist at the time he makes it. All the certainties, all the uncertainties, all the bigness of his spirit and the littlenesses are in it.
If you do not act on a suggestion at first, you grow dull to its message.