Quotes About Expression

Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It's a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art , but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

An artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.

We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists—find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest—but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.

There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.

It beats all the things that wealth can give and everything else in the world to say the things one believes, to put them into form, to pass them on to anyone who may care to take them up.

Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.

THE TECHNIQUE of a little individuality will be a little technique, however scrupulously elaborated it may be.

The picture should only start the observer, should make him think he sees more than is on the canvas. To do this, the painter takes all the factors of the canvas and sets them in motion. He must create a rhythm of movement through all.

Every great artist is a man who has freed himself . . . Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a "universal" without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation. He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.

It is a creation of your own mind, not the model. The model is dependent on your idea of her. Your canvas should be a thing created under the influence of her.

Pictures tell the story of actual impulse in the artist—or the lack of it.

If I could see and really understand the essence of the life that is right around me I could with even such technique as I now command make masterpieces.

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it if you wanted to.

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.

The effect of brilliancy is to be obtained principally from the oppositions of cool colors with warm colors, and the oppositions of grave colors with bright colors. If all the colors are bright there is no brightness.

The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence... We make our discoveries while in the state because then we are clear-sighted.

Give me a kisse, and to that kisse a score; Then to that twenty, adde a hundred more; A thousand to that hundred; so kisse on, To make that thousand up a million; Treble that million, and when that is done, Let's kisse afresh, as when we first begun.

Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score Then to that twenty, add a hundred more A thousand to that hundred so kiss on, To make that thousand up a million. Treble that million, and when that is done, Let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun.

Bashfulnesse Of all our parts, the eyes expresse The sweetest kind of bashfulnesse.

I ain't much for advice. Never been any good with words the way some men are. But I know, sometimes the tears just don't come. When the time comes to start healin', you oughta let yourself.

There is a danger in letting a camera make all its preprogrammed decisions for you:

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." [ Modernism's Patriarch ( Time Magazine , June 10, 1996)]