Artist Quotes

I want to take retirement rather than feel as if it's taking me unawares. Maybe even seize it joyously. But at least behold it without looking back so longingly that I turn into a pillar of regret.

It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

If it hurt me to have to give up a painting I figured it had to hurt them to write the check. That's how I came up with the price for my work.

Making a cartoon occupied usually about three full days, two spent in labour and one in removing the appearance of labour.

Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies.

The most perfect steersman that you can have, and the best helm, lies in the triumphal gateway of copying from nature. And this outdoes all other models; and always rely on this with a stout heart, especially as you begin to gain some judgment in draftsmanship.

Cennino Cennini

Dissatisfaction with one's self and dissatisfaction with the world - is necessary - it is one of the prime things that keeps the artist going on - that drives him - happiness, as such, must come in between times, as best it can.

Clarence John Laughlin

The warm green of the grass, sprinkled with flowers of many hues, is a carpet whereon we walk with noiseless tread.

An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention.

Joshua Reynolds

If the glass there in front of me astounds me more than all the glasses I've seen in painting, and if I even think that the greatest architectural wonder of the world couldn't affect me more than this glass, it's really not worth while going to the Indies to see some temple or other when I have as much and more right in front of me.

Alberto Giacometti

I'm a sucker for tragedy - I love the death scenes.

I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't.

Day comes and goes, night comes and goes...
Sinking your head in hands clasped tight,
You wonder why there still comes no
Apostle of wisdom, truth and right.

Taras Shevchenko

Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.

Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

You don't have to agree with Trump but the mob can't make me not love him. We are both dragon energy.

Crows know the value of organization, and are as well drilled as soldiers - very much better than some soldiers, in fact, for crows are always on duty, always at war, and always dependent on each other for life and safety.

Ernest Thompson Seton

The freeze of a photographic gesture, the fix of an action, how an arm twists, how a smile gets momentarily stabilized or exaggerated - to try to get some of this is important... The photofix inflects the almost literal shaping of a figure, changes of movement or potential movement, and a sense of occurrence or event.

You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important.

All the technique you can learn - and you should learn everything you can - you should have it here in the fingers not here in the head - and then you forget about it.

Somehow, one never really runs away, or I never have, and I find that the faster I go the more catches up with me... all the while time stands, to me, still - straight up and down like a great white sheet.

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Since 1873, I have been back four or five times. I have used the best cameras and the most sensitive emulsions on the market. I have snapped my shutter, morning, noon and afternoon. I have never come close to matching those first plates. (On photographing The Mountain of the Holy Cross)

William Henry Jackson