James Elkins Quotes

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Art Giving Painting

Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.

James Elkins

Artist, Color, Painting

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Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.

James Elkins

Portraits, Records, Movement

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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The opposite of a glance... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second.

James Elkins

Opposites, Glimpse, Glances

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Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been a mongrel among academic pursuits, borrowing whatever it needed from other fields.

James Elkins

Art, Long, Criticism

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Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.

James Elkins

Art, Hands, Color

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.193, Routledge

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As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

James Elkins

Oil, Doe, Stories

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

James Elkins

Metamorphosis, Seeing, Mechanism

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In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a theorist might be, to signal how inextricably linked these existences and practices might be.

James Elkins

Artist, Practice, Want

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All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not.

James Elkins

Hurt, Thinking, Littles

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Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.

James Elkins

Mirrors, Substance

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.45, Routledge

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To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when a painting's finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place.

James Elkins

Simple, Firsts, Finishing

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To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime.

James Elkins

Beautiful, Morning, Blood

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.4, Routledge

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What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.

James Elkins

Art, Thinking, Important

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.3, Routledge

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Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer

James Elkins

Seers, Seeing

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Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.

James Elkins

Years, Trying, Want

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.187, Routledge

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Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

James Elkins

Moving, Giving, Looks

"Are Artists Bored by Their Work?" by James Elkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 15, 2010.

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A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow of the entire Earth, cast upward onto the atmosphere itself... I saw it over the great plains, and I felt as if I could sense the Earth pivoting silently under my feet.

James Elkins

Dark, Feet, Atmosphere

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The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset... looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high in the sky over the place the sun has set, and then it quickly expands and sinks until it blends with the colors underneath.

James Elkins

Sunset, Color, Sky

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Most people would guess that the sun is fifty or a hundred times brighter than the moon, but it's a half million times brighter - evidence of the amazing capacity of our eyes to adjust to light and dark.

James Elkins

Eye, Dark, Moon

James Elkins (2007). “How to Use Your Eyes”, p.215, Routledge

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The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter.

James Elkins

Memories, Gestures, Matter

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.2, Routledge

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It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.

James Elkins

Play, Numbers, Leaving

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.49, Routledge

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The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.

James Elkins

Oil, Discovery, Brilliant

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.

James Elkins

Emotional, Artist, Important

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Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.

James Elkins

Mood, Inarticulate, Projection

James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.45, Routledge

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I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments.

James Elkins

Artist, Achievement, Ambitious

James Elkins (2005). “Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings”, p.6, Routledge

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Born: 1955
Occupation: Art critic
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