Painting Quotes - page 77
Illusionistic art appeals to what the public knows not about art but about things. This ability to brush art aside is the secret of the popularity of illusionism. Ever since the Greeks told of painted grapes being pecked by real birds, wonder at skill in deceiving the eye has moved more people than appreciation of aesthetic quality. But for art to depend exclusively upon reproducing appearances has the disadvantage of requiring that the painting or sculpture conform to the common perception of things.
Harold Rosenberg
I was tired of painting. So many collectors bought paintings and locked them in bank vaults. The stained-glass windows allowed me to make public art.... One day a woman stopped me in the street to talk to me about Champ-de-Mars metro station. "Whether it's sunny, rainy, or snowing, I love your stained-glass windows at Champ-de-Mars. Those big dancing shapes always warm my heart." That woman was neither a collector nor an art critic, but she understood the meaning I meant to give that work.
Marcelle Ferron
Jesus Christ, nailed to the Cross [in his painting 'Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar)',] is turned to the setting sun, here the image of the totally enlivening Father. With Christ dies the wisdom of the old world, the time when God the Father wandered directly on Earth. This sun set and the world was no longer able to apprehend the departed light. The evening glow shining from the pure noble metal of the golden crucified Christ is reflected in gentle glow to the earth. The Cross stands raised on a rock, unshakably firm, as our faith in Jesus Christ. Around the Cross stand the evergreens, enduring through all seasons, as does the belief of Man in Him, the crucified.
Caspar David Friedrich
The tall fellow Bazille has done something I find quite fine: a young girl [in his painting 'View on the village' ] in a very light dress in the shadow of a tree beyond which one sees a town. There is a good deal of light, sunlight, He is trying to do what we [Berthe and her sister Edma] have so often tried to bring off: to paint a figure in the open air. This time I think he has succeed.
Berthe Morisot
A small woman in white, wearing a delicate knitted cap, looks at herself in a small hand-held mirror; she is sitting on a sofa, also white, silhouetted against a white muslin curtain through which the light passes, playing deliciously over the whole symphony of white, and the effect of the back-lighting creates astonishing shades of gray. Such difficulty overcome with such charm [in the painting 'Jeune Femme au miroir / Young Woman at Her Looking Glass', Berthe Morisot painted in 1876].
Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot's uniqueness way to 'live' her painting, and to paint her life.. ..she took up, put down, returned to her brush like a thought that comes to us, is clean forgotten, then occurs to us once again. It is this that gives her work the very particular charm of a close, almost indissoluble connection between the artist's ideal and the intimacy of an individual life.
Berthe Morisot
[Letter received to the Banksy website:] "I don't know who you are or how many of you there are but i am writing to ask you to stop painting your things where we live. In particular XXXXXX road in Hackney. My brother and me were born here and have lived here all our lives but these days so many yuppies and students are moving here neither of us can afford to buy a house where we grew up anymore. Your graffities are undoubtably part of what makes these wankers think our area is cool. You're obviously not from round here and after you've driven up the house prices you'll probably just move on. Do us all a favour and go do your stuff somewhere else like Brixton. -daniel" [sic; name and address not withheld].
Banksy
Kennedy also made a point of phoning his colleagues and their family members at times of personal crisis, a gesture made even more powerful by the implicit reminder of the tragedies Kennedy himself had endured. He was among the first to call when the son of Oregon's Republican senator Gordon Smith committed suicide. He stood by West Virginia's fragile and elderly Democrat Robert Byrd when he lost his beloved wife of 68 years, Erma. Asked for advice on bone cancer treatment for the nephew of Ohio Republican George Voinovich, Kennedy delivered - along with a personal call and painting to the ailing nephew. But perhaps most important, Kennedy understood the art of compromise and the value of incremental progress.
Ted Kennedy
Durand likes my paintings, but not the style of execution. His son, the one who went to New York with him, saw them but has not said a word to me. - Durand prefers the old execution, however he grants that my recent paintings have more light - in short, he isn't very keen. My 'Grey Weather' doesn't please him; his son and Caseburne [Durand's cashier] also dislike it.. .It appears that the subject is unpopular. They object to the red roof and backyard just what gave character to the painting which has the stamp of a modern primitive, and they dislike the brick houses, precisely what inspired me..
Camille Pissarro
The explanation Marxism offered of the significance of History was ludicrously simple, and in this very simplicity lay its charm, and its strength. The whole history of the world was merely the record of the struggle of classes. Religion, philosophy, science, technics, music, painting, poetry, nobility, priesthood, Emperor and Pope State, war, and politics - all are simply reflections of economics. Not economics generally, but the "struggle" of "classes." The most amazing thing about this ideological picture is that it was ever put forward seriously, or taken seriously.
Francis Parker Yockey
My dear Theo.. ..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. There are 3 Corot's at the Salon [in Paris], very beautiful, the most beautiful one, painted shortly before his death, 'Women cutting wood', will probably appear as a woodcut in 'L'Illustration or Le Monde Illustré'.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
..it [the large painting 'Bathers at Asnieres', by Georges Seurat was painted in great flat strokes, brushed one over the other, fed by a palette composed, like Delacroix's, of pure and earthy colors. By means of these ochres and browns the picture is deadened, and appears less brilliant than those the impressionists paint with a palette limited to prismatic colors. But the understanding of the laws of contrast, the methodical separation of elements - light, shade, local color, and the interaction of colors - and their proper balance and proportion, give this canvas its perfect harmony.
Paul Signac
Dear Does [= Theo van Doesburg ], thank you for your letter.. .I was glad to know that in principle you are in favour of the diamond hanging [Mondrian's painting, he made in 1919, hanging in a rhombus] and I think that in practice you will approve of this method for some of my things. You look at the thing [painting] itself, and not only the outward appearance..
Piet Mondrian
Well, Mondrian is absolute, and is pure, and those are real aspirations of our [American Abstract Expressionism art]. When I say 'pure', I don't mean 'clean' . I don't think Mondrian himself did; I knew him when he was here [New York] during the war. He went to an exhibition by the Surrealist, Tanguy, and was asked what he thought, and he said he would like Tanguy's pictures better if they were dirtier, that for him they were to clean.. .I think he meant that when they were to 'clean', they were essentially lifeless, statuesque, unrevised. As for me, I must say, Mondrian's painting is intensely rhythmic, warm, passionate - restricted as the means ostensibly seem to me.
Piet Mondrian
But already in his early works, as in the still-life of 1893.. ..there is a tendency towards the static and well-balanced arrangement. He has a preference for painting in atmospheric conditions which tend to efface the individual forms and emphasize the general outline: Mondrian: 'I often sketched by moonlight - cows resting or standing immovable in flat Dutch meadows, or houses with dead, blank windows. I never painted these things romantically'.
Piet Mondrian
![Perhaps he [Mondrian] was too faithful to a single discovery. And perhaps that kind of painting was right for the period. But now peace and harmony are no longer possible. There is only anguish. (Piet Mondrian)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/13/piet-mondrian-anguish-discovery-1011513.webp)
As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism. ...This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe... Manet's painting... reveals a theme... the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality. ...also startlingly modern because of its style. Several decades before Cézanne began to collapse three dimension into two, Manet here had already flattened the viewer's sense of perspective...
Eric Kandel
His great object was to obtain the glitter and sparkle of nature after a shower; and for this purpose, passing by the oak and elm, our two first trees, he took the white poplar and the ash - the one for the leaf, the other for the bark. This I had from himself, and it is a key to his pictures. A French paysagiste [landscape-painter] once came from Paris to request him to show him his method of painting. Constable said he should have been most happy to meet his wishes, but that unfortunately he had no method, and got his pictures up he did not know how. This I had from Mr. Field, who was present.
John Constable
