FRIENDS
...and maybe a few incredible artists :)
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
~Michaelangelo Buonarroti
"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
~Henry Ward Beecher
"In painting, and above all in portraiture," says Madame Cavé in her charming essay, "it is soul which speaks to soul: and not knowledge which speaks to knowledge."
This observation, more profound perhaps than she herself was aware, is an arraignment of pedantry in execution. A hundred times I have said to myself, "Painting, speaking materially, is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator."
~Delacroix.
The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.
~John Berger
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
~Sir Thomas Browne
Art is the signature of civilizations.
~Beverly Sills
Shall Painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts.
~Blake.
"But from the moment we become painters we are swimming in vast waters, in the fullness of colour, the fullness of reality. Our tussle with things is a hard direct one. Things sustain us. A sugar bowl can teach us as much about ourselves and our art as a Chardin or a Monticelli. Our pictures are quite literally nature morte."
~Cezanne
I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten....
~John Berger
"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."
~Albert Camus
"A good artist borrows, a great artist steals."
~Pablo Picasso
He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto.
Love and delight therein are better teachers of the Art of Painting than compulsion is.
If a man is to become a really good painter he must be educated thereto from his very earliest years. He must copy much of the work of good artists until he attain a free hand.
To paint is to be able to portray upon a flat surface any visible thing whatsoever that may be chosen.
It is well for any one first to learn how to divide and reduce to measure the human figure, before learning anything else.
~Dürer.
"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art."
~Marc Chagall
The painter requires such knowledge of mathematics as belongs to painting, and severance from companions who are not in sympathy with his studies, and his brain should have the power of adapting itself to the tenor of the objects which present themselves before it, and he should be freed from all other cares. And if, while considering and examining one subject, a second should intervene, as happens when an object occupies the mind, he ought to decide which of these subjects presents greater difficulties in investigation, and follow that until it becomes entirely clear, and afterwards pursue the investigation of the other. And above all he should keep his mind as clear as the surface of a mirror, which becomes changed to as many different colours as are those of the objects within it, and his companions should resemble him in a taste for these studies; and if he fail to find any such, he should accustom himself to be alone in his investigations, for in the end he will find no more profitable companionship.
~Leonardo da Vinci.
"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."
~Paul Gauguin
"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
~Friedrich Nietzsche
Let us agree as to the meaning of the word "finished." What finishes a picture is not the quantity of detail in it, but the rightness of the general effect. A picture is not limited only by its frame. Whatever be the subject, there must be a principal object on which your eyes rest continually: the other objects are only the complement of this, they are less interesting to you; and after that there is nothing more for your eye.
There is the real limit of your picture. This principal object must seem so to the spectator of your work. Therefore, one must always return to this, and state its colour with more and more decision.
~Rousseau.
Pupils, I give you the whole art of sculpture when I tell you—draw!
~Donatello.
In my judgment that is the excellent and divine painting which is most like and best imitates any work of immortal God, whether a human figure, or a wild and strange animal, or a simple and easy fish, or a bird of the air, or any other creature. And this neither with gold nor silver nor with very fine tints, but drawn only with a pen or a pencil, or with a brush in black and white. To imitate perfectly each of these things in its species seems to me to be nothing else but to desire to imitate the work of immortal God. And yet that thing will be the most noble and perfect in the works of painting which in itself reproduced the thing which is most noble and of the greatest delicacy and knowledge.
~Michael Angelo.
"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."
~Hendrik Willem Van Loon
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.
~Michaelangelo
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