From Marion Boddy-Evans,
Your Guide to Painting.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Joy of Modern Art: "In listening to a concert, the music-lover experiences a joy qualitatively different from that experienced in listening to natural sounds, such as the murmur of a stream... Similarly [modern] painters provide ... artistic sensations due exclusively to the harmony of lights and shades and independent of the subject depicted in the picture."
-- Parisian art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, On the Subject in Modern Painting, 1912.

"Painting, like music, has nothing to do with reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood non-objective [abstract] painting."
-- Hilla Rebay, The Beauty of Non-Objectivity (quoted in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, p145)

Patience: "Nothing can be rushed. It must grow, it should grow of itself, and if the time ever comes for that work -- then so much the better!"
-- Paul Klee, in On Modern Art, 1948.

Renoir's Color Mixing: "He always mixed his colors on the canvas. He was very careful to keep an impression of transparency in his picture throughout the different phases of the work ... he worked on the whole surface of his canvas [and] the motif gradually emerged from the seeming confusion, with each brushstroke."
-- Jean Renoir, son of the Impressionist Painter Auguste Renoir, writing in his memoir Renoir: My Father

Physical Side of a Painting: "Making people forget the extent to which painting a picture depending on material processes [stretching and nailing canvases, grinding pigment] became necessary for those who wished to convince the public that the artist was no hired hand performing manual work, but a creative artist who used his judgement, learning and imagination to produce works whose merit lay as much in the idea itself as much in its execution." -- Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen, How to Read Paintings, page 104

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." -- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, quoted in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, p219.

Finger Painting: "Throughout history a small number of artists have rejected both palette knives and brushes. A few used their fingers to spread the paint. Artists turned to such primal means for various reasons, including display of skill, experimental playfulness, or nose-thumbing at convention.
"...The young Leonardo's use of his fingers can be linked to the properties of the newly available medium of oil painting. ... It should not surprise us that he played with the tackiness of the new oil medium, palpating the paint as he sought new effects."
-- Seeing Through Paintings by Andrea Kirsch and Rustin S Levenson, p133/4.

Painting from Photos: "I always think photographs abominable, and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love.... photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed."
-- Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, 19 September 1889.

Inspiration and Uniqueness: "Inspiration alone belongs altogether to the individual; everything else, including skill, can now be acquired by anyone. Inspiration remains the only factor in the creation of a successful work of art that cannot be copied or imitated. ... [The pictures of Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman] "look easy to copy, and maybe they really are. But they are far from easy to conceive, and their quality and meaning lies almost entirely in their conception... "The onlooker who says his child could paint a Newman may be right, but Newman would have to be there to tell the child exactly what do do. The exact choices of color, medium, size, shape, proportion -- including the size and shape of the support -- are what alone determine the quality of the result, and these choices depend solely on inspiration or conception."
-- Clement Greenberg, New York art critic, in his essay After Abstract Expressionism, first published in Art International, VI, no.8, October 1962.

Difficulty: "Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been."
-- Robert Henri, in his book The Art Spirit, p135.

Color: "I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns."
-- Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, 1932.

Cochineal Red: "When I started telling my stories about cochineal, many people were horrified, or at least surprised to learn where it comes from. If they didn't already know it was made from insects, they found the truth hard to believe. Sixteenth-century Europeans had the same problem."
-- Victoria Finlay in Color: Travels Through the Paintbox, p165.

Interpreting Paintings: "Our perception of a work of art is not something that is fixed. It depends as much, if not more, on the period in which the work is being viewed and on our expectations of it as it does on the period in which it was created."
-- Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen in How to Read Paintings, pxii.

"...to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life."
-- Clive Bell, The Aesthetic Hypothesis, quoted in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, p72.

Gauguin: "For the mystical Gauguin, art's mission was to detach itself from earthly reality and, through arrangements of pure colour, float free, taking the beholder into a blissed-out state of alternative consciousness. Use your imagination, he would tell Vincent [van Gogh]; paint from memory, not from what's in front of you."
-- Arts critic Simon Schama, Power of Art, p321.