I was feeling guilty about wanting some days off when I ran into the following quote. When I work long hours, day after day, I tend to lose my perspective....

"Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime. There is a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

-Martha Graham

There's a quote I love by the great artist Vincent Van Gogh. When asked where his inspiration came from, he said simply, "I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams."

Someone sent a link to web pages relating to another thread and there I found these quotes from an interview with Nelson Shanks. I don't know if it is an "Artsy Quote" but it is provocative. http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2...n_shanks1.html

Here is part of the interview:

"We briefly discussed the realist protest that was held in New York outside The Whitney Museum of American Art last September. Nelson said that he had heard about it, but was unable to attend. Nonetheless, his outspoken sentiment about the subject of the Biennial is shared by many realists, "I think those people ought to be brought to their knees. They are taste makers who know very little about art. They just know what sort of dazzles their minimal mentalities. Most of it is pseudo-psychiatric. It's all a bunch of nonsense for the great part. But I have to tell you that I really do feel that part of the problem at the moment that's causing much exclusion of realism, is the lack of quality in realism. Let's face it, it's a fact. If there were people around who painted like Boldini and Sargent and Vermeer ... it would be seen and it would be spoken about and it would be exhibited. But the fact of the matter is that "much of the realism that is exhibited is of lesser quality. But when it's realism it has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry."

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.

- Abraham Maslow :thumbsup:

Chase Quotes

I took these quotes a some time ago from a book on Chase and whose title I cannot remember nor find at the moment but wanted to share because they mean a lot to me. They are not directed toward portraiture but readily apply to our specialty. I quote him often.

Quotes from William Merritt Chase, Painter

" Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be
distinguished."

" Great work comes from the heart. When only from the head, It is uninteresting."

" A delicate subject requires vigorous treatment to avoid the Bon-Bon type."

" Nothing is more difficult than flowers."

" I will venture the remark:

Chase
 

This is my favorite Chase quote, " a painting should look as if it were blown on in one puff"

"You Can Paint! No Art Knowledge Needed!"

-- from the cover of a book, presumably containing no "art knowledge", published in Australia.

A few items lifted from Cay Lang's "Taking the Leap -- Building a Career as a Visual Artist":

Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results. (Tao te Ching)

Lay off the Muses -- it's a very tough dollar. (S.J. Perelman)

I think I'm beginning to learn something about it.
(Auguste Renoir, his last words about painting, at age seventy-eight.)

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. (Douglas Adams)

I think I'll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.

--- a passage from poet Stephen Dunn, writing about his work, on the eve of his 60th birthday. It struck me as applicable to visual arts as well.

"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror or the painter?"- Pablo Picasso

And I recently found this quote taken from prominent product designer a long time ago when I was working as a designer for a large manufacturing company and kept it on my desk for many years. I referred to it often when I had to deal with customers or marketing types who were usually adverse to change. Though it was meant for commercial artists, it could apply to our craft as well.

"To remain uncompromisingly sensitive in the artist's way; to adhere uncompromisingly to aesthetic conviction; to do this as an instrument for the fulfillment of the aims of those who do not understand them, places almost superhuman demands upon creativity. Yet this is what the commercial artist who remains an artist has, uncompromisingly, to do."

I have no idea who originated the following one-liners, but I really like 'em:

If logic tells you that life is a meaningless accident, don't give up on life. Give up on logic. -Shira Millgrom


People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest person with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest person with the smallest mind. Think big anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack if you help them. Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you might get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you've got anyway.
-Mother Teresa


I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.
I've lost more than 300 games.
Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot...and missed.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life...
And THAT is why I succeed.
-Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls

This quote is soooo old.
 

How/what did they paint back then?

Simonides C 556-468 BC
Plutarch Moralia

I don't know who said this:

"Art is nature concentrated".

Not Painting related, but definitely Online Forum Related. :)
 

"Everyone wants to be the gadfly. No one volunteers to be the stingable horse."

I found and lifted this from a post by Alicia Kornick. Thanks Alicia, I really like this.

James on Sargent
 

Henry James said of young JS Sargent, "He has an insolent degree of talent".

For those of us focused on the face
 

Here's a quote I came across recently. While it's not exactly an "Art" quote, it sure tells us why we, as painters, are drawn to portraits.

'The human face is the most individual of all things. It knows its owner

Three From Wyeth
 

Here's a few quotes from Andrew Wyeth:

"I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it."

"I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes."

"To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me. If I have an emotion, before I die, that's deeper than any emotion that I've ever had, then I will paint a more powerful picture that will have nothing to do with just technique, but will go beyond it."

Harley Brown
 

"You have to draw at least an hour a day, just to keep from getting worse!"

(Harley, I think that's pretty close!)


Unknown:

"Good paintings go fast; bad paintings take forever."

From historian David McCullough

Steven:

What a great quote! :)

:) Not a quote but love this from "A Secret Life" of Andrew Wyeth;

Sometimes I think I am not very artistic, because people will say "did you notice the amazing sulfur yellow in the sky..." That stuff never strikes me to paint. It's got to click with something I'm already thinking about. Then my hair rises on the back of my neck. I get goose pimples." -Richard Meryman

...and maybe a couple more --

"If I am steamed up on the subject then I just can't think of anything else----so excited it affects my stomach.....Wyeth

and also as he sat in a bedroom gazing at the the Masonite panel-------Wyeth explained, "This time in a painting is terribly tiring, when you have nothing on the panel except a few strokes and you are filling in between the lines of what's not there.That's when I lose weight like mad, because I am seeing something that does not yet exist."

Andrew Wyeth--A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

Kitty Osler Gould Williams, my mother, and most mothers cornered during a studio critique. ;)

Words I live by
 

I'm pretty sure it was Michaelangelo that said,

"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."

I guess that would fit anyone who feels like their worst critic.

Steven,

Re: The John Adams quote: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain".

I don't understand Mr. Adams' quote. It sounds a bit like a trickle down of significant and worthy interests or studies. Perhaps the interests of the grandchildren should be the prerequisite for those that are caught up in the importance of politics and war. It might make leaders less arrogant.

It sounds as though he considers painting, poetry, etc., as one step above gardening, games, and mere play.

My interpretation of the Adams quote is just the opposite. I felt he meant that the arts were the highest calling, kind of like the self-actualization at the top of Maslow's heirarchy.

Quite the contrary, on my reading. I believe that he was saying that the appreciation and practice of art forms of the sort that he named was of the highest pursuit to which we could aspire -- indeed, he was, as I read the letter in context, fleshing out what had been meant in the Declaration of Independence by the right of the "pursuit of happiness". I think he was expressing his belief in an obligation of his generation to fight for and ensure a society in which higher levels of human pursuit could be enjoyed in peace by his later generations.

He wrote from Paris, where he had been sent by the Continental Congress to solicit France's assistance in the colonies' battles for independence. He was on a war mission, yet his assignment placed him amidst an art culture the likes of which he'd never seen. Though both he and his wife Abigail were deeply schooled in the classics (including, somewhat ironically, the British classics), as would be their children, nothing of the sort he encountered in France had ever visited the American colonial life. Adams felt deeply the spiritual lacuna of that educational deficit, which is why I read the quotation as looking to the higher calling that attended his "war business" -- which was to try to ensure that future generations, if not his, would live in liberty and the freedom, together with the educational infrastructure, to pursue the higher, loftier -- and Adams might say, the more morally realized -- engagements in arts far more gentle than war.

This is quite a distance from equating art with "mere gardening" -- though Adams reveled in his New England farmer's role, when war and politics allowed.

I think Adams' intent was to pay homage to the contributions of those who, as did our grandfathers, fathers, and brothers within memory, engaged in the kinds of selfless, coarse, and sometimes brutal prerequisites to establishing a free and orderly society in which their children could, in peace, "study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain," as we do here on this Forum, which we take for granted even though it would certainly be "illegal" in many oppressively governed countries around the world.

I'm not defending all of his sentiments, just trying to understand their very articulate expression in the context in which they were presented.

I can't recommend too highly the McCullough biography of Adams. There are over a thousand letters extant between Adams and Abigail, and every one of them is a gem with its own facets. It's very important, I believe, for artists to undertake as much "non-art" study as easel time, workshops, videos, and the latest issue of your favorite art magazine. The artwork will be all the richer for it.

John Adams

Perhaps I am caught up in the order in which his quote unfolds or an implied need to make these studies separate and distinct. As much as I can agree that the artist benefits by interests and education outside the typical and expected courses of study, it would be equally of great benefit to those who attempt to lead countries and conduct war to study "The Arts".

As has been noted, Mr. Adams had this kind of education but his quote suggests something less than the kind of holistic study that made him so valuable to our country. I also am responding to an almost common notion that those trained and occupied in "creative" activities do not understand matters of business, politics, and war. Adams does not say this and his intentions are most likely as others have said, but the quote implies that the arts are not critical to the economy and political philosophy and are employed mostly during good times.

I also intend to get Mr. McCullough's book.

It always seems to me invigorating to wade in the pool of the thoughts and experience of someone engaged in a pursuit or discipline other than the one that is capturing my attention at the time (here, portraiture). That might mean reading a physicist

I like that. Thanks for posting it, Steven.

Of course it does - it is the truth.

How many people do you think care much about the arts when their main concern is to feed their family or to avoid the next attack on their home?

I would bet that the arts is the farthest thing on the minds of most of those in Iraq at the moment. Sure, even during bad times there are brief moments that can offer a escape from the daily struggle, that one may reflect on a song or poem or a image. Many solders even have carried a sketchbook to capture these moments.

But the pursuit of the arts as a study is historically reserved to cultures that have first provided their citizens with peace and prosperity enough to pursue leisure activities.

If you cannot see that, then you are ignoring history. Look at the great cultures of the past that have spawned the milestones of the arts: the Greeks, the Romans, China, the Egyptians and the European Renaissance. All of these cultures first needed to provide for the basic needs of peace and prosperity before the arts could flourish. In China it was the Ming Dynasty that brought peace to most of China; in Egypt it was the reign of the pharaohs and the life-giving water of the Nile to support agriculture. And so on through out history. Only after the basic needs of a culture are provided can the arts flourish. It does not make the arts less important; in fact, the point is the arts are the pinnacle of any great culture. But one must lay a foundation before one can reach the pinnacle.

Whoops! I guess I missed the part where Mr. Adams was struggling for survival when he said he must study politics and war? (To the exclusion of other valuable studies?). As noted he was not denied an education with broader influences and the contributions they may have added to his value as a statesman. My concern is that the arts might be considered an outside extra thing and only be considered a blessing and diversion available in "good times". I especially like Steve's comments in the first paragraph of his post above. He noted a significant benefit to the artist by exposure to the observations of others and I argue only that this same benefit applies to all other professions as well. For the same reasons I would also argue that rulers and politicians would be much stronger if the same kind of questioning were an integral part of their training and understanding. It might do much to prevent them from believing that they are "the chosen keepers of the human experience". I wish I could trust that political conceit does not prevail.

I don't think of art so much as a way to "escape" and by no means think it should be defined or limited to the decorative arts. As Robert Henri said about the artist (whatever his profession): "When the Artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring self-expressing creature. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible". And: "Art tends towards balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living--"

A pretty lofty opinion of the contribution of the arts but I care to think of our role as far more than that of decorators. I find as much and sometimes more enrichment and communication with the artists of primitive societies than what is produced for so many today that has little more to be said for it than its lavish expense.

I agree that survival is often a preoccupation but creation is a characteristic that differs us from all other living things and does not depend on good times to manifest itself. Why not think of the role of the artist/arts as part of the formation and building blocks of a society and not merely evidence of wealth and sophistication?

From my favorite "Letter to Artists" May 6, 1999

"All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardor of the creative moment: What they manage to express in their painting, their sculpture, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendor which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit." - Pope John Paul II

Haven't many of us here spoken of the "zone" we find ourselves in when we are deeply creating, and it is really happening? My last portrait drawing was of my boyfriend's deceased father, with only a 1930's high school picture as reference. I had never met Charlie. In the middle of the night, when I was fairly finished, but terribly unsatisfied, I sat back and blurred my eyes and "got into Charlie Deegan". The portrait placed him a good ten years older than I knew him to be in the photo. What was I not seeing? Then I had that moment, the "dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardor of the creative moment". The poor quality photo, faded and fuzzy, breathed for a minute second and I saw the 18 year old. With tremendous ease I was able to adjust the portrait and finish, satisfied with the likeness. On Christmas day Charlie's family gasped at the portrait, I watched in awe as tears welled up in children and grandchildren's eyes. They each discussed what features were passed to which sibling, grandchild. It was the most satisfying experience I have had relative to my artistic endeavors.

"...and here we touch on an essential point. Those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark which is the artistic vocation, feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it in order to put it at the service of their neighbor and of humanity as a whole" - Pope John Paul II

I though this thread uplifting to say the least, here are my favourites:

The wise man sees himself in all beings and all being in himself. Therefore he never feels hostility toward anyone.
THE ISHA UPANISHAD SCRIPTURE

. . . if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.Henry Thoreau 1841

Yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.KAHLIL GIBRAN

The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your priciples and can bear the light of day. Dad by day, what you do is who you become.HERACLITUS 450BC

To laugh often and much;To win the respect of intelligent people;To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To know one life has breathed easier because you have lived; This is to have succeeded.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1803-82

When we pay attention to nature's music,we find that everything on the earth contributes to its harmony.HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN

Ngaire, I liked your quotes and especially this one:

I don't know that it is in keeping with the theme of this thread but the above reminded me of an experience I had many years ago. Not wishing to brag and wanting to be sensitive to old high school friends at a class reunion I underplayed my job title at a major company and the fact that I was doing lot of travel in North America and Europe to satisfy design, color and marketing needs for our manufacturing operations outside the USA. Some in my Cleveland schoolmates had become professionals but I was well aware that a good many had not ventured far from the neighborhood. When conversation invariably led to the question of "what do you do?" I modestly stated that I was an "artist". Had I announced that I was president of IBM I could not have experienced a better response. The very fact that Jim Riley, the guy who liked art class more than anything else, was employed doing what he enjoyed most drew response that I had not anticipated. I realized then how big my decision to pursue an art career was and, at the same time, noted that many people never have this same experience and do whatever they do simply because "they have to".

Going to art school was an easy choice. I had no genuine enthusiasm for other areas of study or career objectives but found my specialty less restricting than I could have imagined and can honestly say that the special insights and skills that I developed as an artist allowed me to hold my own and make substantial contribution in corporations heavily staffed and operated by research, engineering and marketing groups. It also had something to do with the fact that a good part of our success depended on our ability to satisfy design and color needs in a changing marketplace.

When friends ask me to see the work of their youngster and discuss schooling and careers I can be frank and encouraging. I am not afraid to give them the brutal facts of life in regard to an art career but given evidence of skill and a strong desire to study art I can confidently say that any good effort will not be a waste. The skills and insights gained will carry with them adding a very special value to whatever new route they take.

"I hope with all my heart that there will be painting in heaven."

--Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 1796-1875
(reputedly his dying words)


"Me too."

--Tom Edgerton