Have a special interest, a positive prejudice about some clump of trees or one particular knoll, an excitement about them can spread through the whole composition, and so fire the rest of the things that you are only mildly interested in.
Don't think of sea as color. Make it a solid that can support a boat. Think of 'wetness' as color-texture.
The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.
In the work of Seurat, you can see the dots of neutral colors carrying the form and then the dots of more intense color that make the color texture. It is a totally different principle that than of the Impressionists who used broken color to imitate visual effect.
There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.
The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.
...in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it.
Sets of lines can say something about the direction and nature of the light. They are used by great fresco painters as a sign for shade.
A piece of drapery is like a necktie, hot stuff to paint, and one of the easiest things for a painter to kid himself into thinking he can do. Don't be fooled by the color. Go after the shape and character. Hew the forms together with colored tones.
When painting a landscape it is desirable to walk through the clumps and around the bushes, around the trees, the houses and the rocks. Familiarizing yourself in this way with the subject, you will get a better concept of the thing and not a visual and false snapshot.
Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive.
Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.
Always think of drawing, getting the forms realized, emphasizing the design.
Think of drawing as a way of talking about the things that interest you. Think of those wonderful documents, drawings made on scraps of paper by the lesser Dutch masters while they were wandering around market places and sitting in saloons.
Draw with the brush. Carve the form. Don't be carried away by subtleties of modeling and nice pigmentation at the expense of losing the form.
Don't be stingy with your paint, it isn't worth it.
Be sensitive to the qualities inherent in the medium. Paint honestly and avoid tricks.
The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and color are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows...Color is surface skin that fits over the form.
Atmosphere in a painting is nine-tenths fear.
The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.
Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.
To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.
Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.
Drawing and composition are the same thing.
Find your own technique.
