Edward Hopper Quotes - Page 2

The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking.

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.

I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose... ...Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part... ...perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts... ...the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events... ...Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects - perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight.

I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use.