Figure Painting Quotes

• If it is the love of that which your work represents--if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you--if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty, and human soul that moves you--if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fullness thereof.

  John Ruskin

  Flower, Moving, Animal

  John Ruskin, Cook (1905). “Works”

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• From the mingled strength of shade and light A new creation rises to my sight, Such heav'nly figures from his pencil flow, So warm with light his blended colors glow. . . . . The glowing portraits, fresh from life, that bring Home to our hearts the truth from which they spring.

  Lord Byron

  Spring, Home, Heart

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• Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh-- To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye. Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What?

  Thomas Hood

  Eye, Drawing, Done

  Thomas Hood (1862). “the works of thomas hood”, p.361

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• I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

  Wayne Thiebaud

  Color, Ordinary, Landscape

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• In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.

  Bernard Berenson

  Space, Enchantment, Movement

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• Monet's work would have been even greater if he had not abandoned figure-painting.

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

  Painting, Abandoned, Monet

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• It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and [Robert von Neumann ] would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Class, Trying, Looks

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.

  Claes Oldenburg

  People, East, Sides

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

  Claes Oldenburg

  Littles, Stuff, Strange

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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