NYAA put up a ‘Quote Museum’ on the fifth floor of the school. Here are some of my favorites, submitted for your approval…
Salvidor Dali : Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.
Fransisco Goya : Anyone who aspires to the name of painter must be capable of reproducing from memory, with brush or pencil, each scene or incident, in all its essential features, after seeing it once.
Francis Bacon : There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.
Winslow Homer : Talent! What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work the right way.
Michelangelo : If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
Leonardo : Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
Dali : Drawing is the honesty of the act. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.
Picasso : Art is the lie that helps us to realize the truth.
Eugene Delacroix : The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
Edgar Degas : Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Degas : Painting is easy for those who do not know how, but very difficult for those that do.
Alberto Giacometti : … the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Paul Gaugin : Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Auguste Renoir : One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.
Bernini : Students would be ruined if at the beginning they were set to draw from nature, for nature is almost always feeble and trifling … Those who make use of nature should be sufficiently skillful to recognize its defects and correct them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson : Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.
I think the path to mastery is pretty clearly laid out… but to end with a quote, “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”
– Jeremy
Nice drawings and nice quotes. For the Leonardo one, I learned a similar one today from the Chinese philosopher Xun Zi:
é’é’æ–¼è—
Blue is bluer than the indigo.
In other words, the indigo plant from which blue dye is made is blue, but the dye itself is bluer than the original plant it came from.
–Loren
I think some of my students should listen to Dali – an unfortunate side affect of giftedness.