Artistic Techniques Quotes

I got my diploma from Ealing College of Art, in graphics and illustration.

In the studio, I don't do a lot of work that requires repetitive activity. I spend a lot of time looking and thinking and then try to find the most efficient way to get what I want, whether it's making a drawing or a sculpture, or casting plaster or whatever.

After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights.

After that I jumped, especially being in art school, to the illustrators.

The Arts are learnt by reason and method; they are mastered by practice.

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.

The first professional training I received of any kind was when I was 14 years old and we were in Kansas City, Missouri. I attended the Kansas City Art Institute for one summer.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

I didn't get a Bachelor's degree - I got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, which means I didn't have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times.

I went to college as a theater major. But after about three weeks of that, I changed to the school of fine arts as a painter.

Grandeur of effect is produced by two different ways which seem entirely opposed to each other. One is by reducing the colors to little more than chiaroscuro... and the other, by making the colors very distinct and forcible... but still, the presiding principle of both those manners is simplicity.

I would have been an artist, because I studied art and history in school and college.

There is no work of art that is without short cuts.

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

As I very much liked to draw and paint as a child, I entered a special art program in high school, which was very much like being in an art school imbedded in a regular high school curriculum.

Know that the secret of the arts is to correct nature.

When mountains and waters are painted, blue, green, and red paints are used, strange rocks and wondrous stones are used, the four jewels and the seven treasures are used. Rice-cakes are painted in the same manner. When a person is painted, the four great elements and five skandhas are used.

As regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect that in these volumes I shall undoubtedly show myself of very considerable importance not only to builders but also to all scholars.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.

In the mid-1970s, I was teaching design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest.