English Artist Quotes

William Blake

Henry Moore

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Joshua Reynolds

Thomas Gainsborough

Beatrix Potter

John Constable

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

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

Joshua Reynolds

We love a genius for what he leaves and mourn him for what he takes away

Thomas Gainsborough

Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy.

Every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.

I am an artist who makes walks. A walk defines the form of the land in space and time beyond the scale of sculpture or the fixed image. Some of my walks are formal (straight, circular, rhythmic) almost ritualised. I have climbed around mountains instead of to the top, I have made walks about slowness, walks about stones and water. I have made walks within a place as opposed to a linear journey; walking without travelling.

It seems to me that art is a great miracle-it is the showing forth of the Holy Spirit transubstantiation. It is to find and proclaim the poetry of life, without which there is no life.

No Southern people ever seem to possess the energy of their Northern brothers, and in Sicily a dolce far niente life is much enjoyed. Time is no object. According to Pliny, Aristhomacus watched the life of the bee carefully for fifty-eight years, which is just the sort of work a Sicilian of to-day would like.

Ethel Brilliana Tweedie

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

I think if she lived in A little shoe-house That little old woman was Surely a mouse!

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

Aubrey Beardsley

I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organized memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.

James Northcote

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

I believe that photographs should be simple technically, and easy to look at. They shouldn't be directed at other photographers; their point is to make ordinary people react – to laugh, or to see something they hadn't taken in before, or to be touched. But not to wince, I think.

Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon

It is not a question so much of a 'tree like a figure' or a 'root like a figure' - it is a question of bringing out the anonymous personality of these things.

Graham Sutherland

They [clouds] come to the dullest and dreariest of scenes like the splendid cortege of an Oriental sovereign who traverses some miserable village.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Designers, stay away from corporations that want you to lie for them

Jonathan Barnbrook

The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.

Austin Osman Spare

Rarely if ever does one feel sure one knows enough to go ahead with much of anything new. You bank on faith and courage and the ability to learn on the job.

Cornelia Parker

How happy a thing were a wedding,
And a bedding,
If a man might purchase a wife
For a twelvemonth and a day

In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson's work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson's work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.

Edward Allington

Nature's children do not reveal their intimate ways to the bustling, human noise-maker, and he who would seek to know something of their interesting daily doings must first of all acquire the faculty to observe whilst remaining unobserved, and hear without being heard.