Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.
Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth.
Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.
What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.
Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.
A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don’t confuse a drawing with a map.
A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
An artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.
When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world.
All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.
A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.
There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.
Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.
An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.
If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea.
When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it.