Painter Quotes - Page 17

• A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will proudce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Hard Work, Paris

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.138, Convergent Books

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• The dust is old upon my "sandal-shoon,"
  And still I am a pilgrim; I have roved
  From wild America to Bosphor's waters,
  And worshipp'd at innumerable shrines
  Of beauty; and the painter's art, to me,
  And sculpture, speak as with a living tongue,
  And of dead kingdoms, I recall the soul,
  Sitting amid their ruins.

  Nathaniel Parker Willis

  Travel, Art, Dust

  Nathaniel Parker Willis (1850). “Sacred Poems”, p.171

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• Albert Durer, the famous painter, used to say he had no pleasure in pictures that were painted with many colors, but in those which were painted with a choice simplicity. So it is with me as to sermons.

  Martin Luther

  Color, Choices, Simplicity

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• Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Art, Two, Forever

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Illustrated)”, p.2078, Delphi Classics

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• The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

  Pablo Picasso

  Giving, Judging, Advice

  Pablo Picasso (1972*). “Picasso: 90 Drawings and Works in Colour”

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• What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint.

  Henry Fielding

  Writing, Sides, Ridiculous

  Henry Fielding (1902). “The history of the adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams”

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• The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision.

  Hartley Coleridge

  Vision, Abiding, Concrete

  Philip Massinger, Hartley Coleridge, John Ford (1848). “The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford. With an introduction, by Hartley Coleridge”, p.20

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• The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.

  Edmund Burke

  Art, Men, Mind

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• As in the case of painters, who have undertaken to give us a beautiful and graceful figure, which may have some slight blemishes, we do not wish then to pass over such blemishes altogether, nor yet to mark them too prominently. The one would spoil the beauty, and the other destroy the likeness of the picture.

  Plutarch

  Beautiful, Giving, Wish

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• The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; .in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Fall, Pride

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• The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Real, Men

  John Ruskin (1859). “Modern Painters: (pt.4) Modern painters of many things”, p.83

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• The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance.

  John Ruskin

  Eye, Expression, Variation

  John Ruskin (1853). “The stones of Venice”, p.127

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• Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven't. An actor can't hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you're not there your art's not there. That's why we actors are often such self-centered objects.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Art, Self, Paper

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• When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

  Joseph Joubert

  Art, Numbers, Wish

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• He who cannot see the beautiful side is a bad painter, a bad friend, a bad lover; he cannot lift his mind and his heart so high as goodness.

  Joseph Joubert

  Beauty, Beautiful, Heart

  Joseph Joubert (1867). “Some of the "Thoughts" of Joseph Joubert”, p.61

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• Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Years, Age

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• Acting is one element in a film. Directing is sort of the painter using all of those elements - sound and music and camera and putting it all together. And that can be fun and exciting. If you fail, it's incredibly upsetting - much more upsetting than when you're an actor. But when you succeed it's incredibly, incredibly exciting, so I like the risk of it all.

  George Clooney

  Fun, Sound And Music, Film Directing

  "The Ides of March - George Clooney interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• My work as a painter has always been tied to Modernism. I read everything I could find related to art, from Paul Cézanne through the 1950s.

  Ed Askew

  Art, Modernism, Related

  Interview with Christian Filardo, logger.believermag.com. November 27, 2013.

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• I think perhaps I've learned to be myself. I have a theory that all artists who would be important - painters and writers - must learn to be themselves. It takes a very long time.

  Margot Fonteyn

  Thinking, Artist, Long

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• The concealment of art by the actor is as great a mark of genius as it is in the painter.

  Francois Delsarte

  Art, Acting, Genius

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• if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

  Pauline Kael

  Thinking, Trying, May

  Pauline Kael (1994). “For keeps”, E P Dutton

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• A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes - but a movie actor waits.

  Mary Astor

  Writing, Play, Waiting

  Mary Astor (1971). “A life on film”

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• ... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Two, Silence, Three

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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• No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

  Storm Jameson

  Art, Communication, Musician

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Parthian Words”, p.88, A&C Black

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• The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Sunshine, Reflection, Light

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