Painting Quotes - page 74
My dear Theo, Thanks for your letter of this morning. Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star.... I've also seen the Louvre and the Luxembourg, as you can imagine. The Ruisdaels in the Louvre are magnificent, especially 'The bush', 'The breakwater' and 'The ray of sunlight.
Vincent van Gogh
What surprising fellows those French painters are. A Millet, Delacroix, Corot, Troyon, Daubigny, Rousseau, and a Daumier.... Something else about Delacroix - he had a discussion with a friend about the question of working absolutely from nature, and said on that occasion that one should take one's 'studies' from nature - but that the 'actual painting' had to be made 'by heart'. This friend was walking along the boulevard when they had this discussion - which was already fairly heated. When they parted the other man was still not entirely persuaded. After they parted, Delacroix let him stroll on for a bit - then (making a trumpet of his two hands) bellowed after him in the middle of the street - to the consternation of the worthy passers-by:
'By heart! By heart!
Vincent van Gogh
Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.
Henri Matisse
Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
Pablo Picasso
Quote in Rembrandt's letter to Constantijn Huygens (Amsterdam, 12 January 1639) on 3 paintings commissioned (in 1635 and started by Rembrandt already in 1635/36) by the imperial court, as cited in Painters on Painting (1963) by Eric Protter, p. 78 / Dutch original text in The Rembrandt Documents, Walter Strauss & Marjon van der Meulen - Abaris Books, New York 1979, p. 161.
Rembrandt
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
Brian Eno
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
Mao Zedong
.. because his applying paint to it [the sculpture 'Painted Bronze, two painted ale cans', created by the American pré-Pop Art artist Jasper Johns ] was absolutely mechanical or, at least, as close to the printed thing as possible. It was not an act of painting; actually, the printing [or painting? ] was just like printing except it was made by hand by him. That doesn't add a thing to it.
Marcel Duchamp
You were asking my opinion on your work of art, my dear Jean [= Duchamp's brother-in-law Jean Crotti, who asked Duchamp his comment on an art-work he made]... Artists throughout the ages are like Monte Carlo gamblers and the blind lottery pulls some of them through and ruin others... I do not believe in painting per se – A painting is made not by the artist but by those who look at it and grant it their favors. In other words, no painters knows himself or what he is doing – There is no outward sign explaining why a Fra Angelico and a Leonardo [da Vinci] are equally 'recognized.
Marcel Duchamp
