How are things visible? Can you see an egg against a white background? Not by drawing a line around it can you make it evident.
Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation’s picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man’s only lasting monument.
It’s impossible to make a picture without values. Values are the basis. If they are not, tell me what is the basis.
You can always draw as well as you know how to. I flatter myself that I feel more than I express on canvas; but I know that is not so.
Inspiration is nothing without work.
I don’t like persuaded sitters. I never could paint a cat if the cat had any scruples, religious, superstitious, or otherwise, about sitting.
Most of us live for the critic, and he lives on us. He doesn’t sacrifice himself. He gets so much a line for writing a criticism. If the birds should read the newspapers, they would all take to changing their notes. The parrots would exchange with the nightingales, and what a farce it would be!
Nature is economical. She puts her lights and darks only where she needs them.
There’s lots of fun in this world, after all. And if there isn’t, there is in the next. And we’re going there, sure.
You can’t do a fine thing without having seen fine examples.
You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!
Strive for simplicity! Don’t have the face a checkerboard of tints! Use such colors as nature uses, but not try to keep them distinct! Your work may be called monotonous, but one tone is better than many which do not harmonize.
The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.
Artists cannot help themselves; they are driven to create by their nature, but for that nature to truly thrive, we need to preserve the precious habitat in which that beauty can flourish.
So with this Earthly Paradise it is, If ye will read aright, and pardon me, Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea...
O thrush, your song is passing sweet, But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.
I have said as much as that the aim of art was to destroy the curse of labour by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth its exercise.
There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful.
Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed.
No man is good enough to be another’s master.