Portrait Artist Forum - Artsy Quotes

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What a neat thread. Here are two music quotes from sources I have forgotten:

An old acomplished artist once said of my work: "It dies of borning." Refering to a passage that I had worked to death.

Speaking of the synergy of music and painting....

Once Miles Davis overheard a musician knocking another for being too derivative--too much an unoriginal reflection of his influences--and in an uncharacteristically (for him) generous moment, said:

"Well, it takes a long time to learn to play like yourself."

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson ~

I had mentioned the book [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0894718347/astrokeofgeniusA/]Leonardo Da Vinci

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jim Riley

A quote from the noted photographer Richard Avedon posted at his 2002 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"I've worked out a series of no's. No to apparent composition. No to the seduction of Pose or narrative. And all these no's force me to the "yes". I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us". R.A.

This is a correction to a previous post. This is the corrected quote.

"Art is a form of self mastery."

Nietzsche

Do not be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated.
You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

David Lloyd George

Quote:

Irritability is the besetting sin of aging artists, as garrulousness is that of aging writers.

--from an article in the current New Yorker magazine, which recounts the anecdote that Winslow Homer tried to 'keep inquisitive ladies away from his outdoor easel' by posting a sign nearby that read "Snakes! Mice!"

I am entranced when I have the privilege of access to a Vandercook printing press, such as those at many regional centers for books arts, under the wing of the Library of Congress' Center for Book Arts. What finally led me to this was probably the experience thirty years earlier, carving linoleum blocks for printmaking in a high school art class.

Now, though it's been years since I set type by hand, I'm still very keen on woodblock printing. (This is what I've been doing again lately.) If you live long enough (to make as many mistakes as I have), you begin to discover parallels in everything (the glorious benefit of living this long), and I thought I'd pass along an observation from George A. Walker, the author of an eminent introduction to woodcut artistry.

I think you can get away with a lot of drawing and color-match failures in art, including portraiture, but I'm familiar with very few successful artists who can get away with omitting what Walker is talking about here -- contrast. Whether it's white paper and black ink, or warm and cool temperatures in hue, or soft and hard edges, or gradations in value in an appropriate range, I have come to believe that contrast is the coin of the realm when it comes to paying your way in art.

Again, this is written to woodcut artists, but it's broadly instructive:

Quote:

A central principle I always teach my students is the value of opposites. Heraclitus said two thousand years ago that art is shaped by the tensions that exist between opposites. "Harmony," he says, "needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman." This manifests itself in myriad ways: simplicity and complexity, drama and comedy, tradition and innovation, real and perceived, large and small, concave and convex, controlled and accidental, deliberate and spontaneous, to list a few. But of this interplay of opposites, none is more immediate than the contrast of dark line on light surface or light line on dark surface. Without the contrast, you see nothing. Simple as that.