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.
Your painting is the marking of your progression into nature, a sensation of something you see way beyond the two pretty colors over there. Don’t stop to paint the material, but push on to give the spirit.
Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.
Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.
Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.
The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.
There is no art without contemplation.
In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.
Color is only beautiful when it means something.
Good composition is like a suspension bridge – each line adds strength and takes none away.
All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.
The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture; but an idea.
Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.