Thomas Eakins Quotes

I've been trying to pick up painting but it's hard.

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

I'm a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.

To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

I use dull colors in my drawings because I started out using a root beer base, because it seemed like an interesting idea, and when it turned out that it worked quite well as an ink, I started using other colors that would complement it, like grays from Higgins black writing ink and, more recently, Dr. P.H. Martin's olive green and vermilion.

I'm thinking about color all the time. Sometimes even as far back as the plotting sequence.

I am very much an artist. I like painting and collaging.

If you've never mixed paint, you aren't going to be able to paint properly.

Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter. I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done. But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun's rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you're left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

My palette contains a warm and cool of each primary, plus four modifiers: Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Blue-Violet and Phthalo Yellow-Green just mix as I go for each painting.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

Well, the beginning is actually quite easy, because I can still be quite free about the way I handle things - colours, shapes. And so a picture emerges that may look quite good for a while, so airy and colourful and new. But that will only last for a day at most, at which point it starts to look cheap and fake. And then the real work begins - changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until it's done.