Stan Smith Quotes

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.

What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

Many painters had a clear idea of what fractals are. Take a French classic painter named Poussin. Now, he painted beautiful landscapes, completely artificial ones, imaginary landscapes. And how did he choose them? Well, he had the balance of trees, of lawns, of houses in the distance. He had a balance of small objects, big objects, big trees in front and his balance of objects at every scale is what gives to Poussin a special feeling.

The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things.

I can only draw what I see.

Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed.

It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.

One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

Is negative space the space you don't like, or the space that is not there? And if it's not there how can you tell?

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

I do feel like no matter what you're doing, whether it's music or writing a play or a poem or drawing a picture or painting something, that you're speaking to what is it you want to express, what is it you want to see.

Being blind is as simple as closing your eyes. The blind don't act any different than you or I. You never see a blind person going around saying, 'I'm blind.' So if you want to play blind just close your eyes and keep them closed and fare thee well.

The relation of color and the relation of proportion are both based on the relation of position.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

I was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of hours on that and then putting the rest of the body on the face only in the last hour. It didn't work to just tell them, 'Well, you're really not thinking of the body as a totality.' So in desperation I would put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't see it. They had to draw the body and then at the end of the session for an hour I would take the drape off just to try to reverse their procedure.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of things than that symmetry itself.

In reality some images or drawings have a greater impact than many buildings that are built.