“Remember never to make a surface so white that you could not make it yet far whiter. ” Leon Battista Alberti 1404‑1472
“The shadow of flesh should be of burnt terra verde.” Leonardo 1452‑1519
“I try not to have things look as if chance had brought them together, but as if they had a necessary bond between them….I want to put strongly and completely all that is necessary, for I think things weakly said might as well not be said at all...” Millet 1814‑1875
“...in every well-found work there will always be an arabesque of rhythm — which will not prevent fine and subtle relationships of texture.” Georges Rouault
“A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.” James A. MacNeil Whistler 1834‑1903
“What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality… like the famous cabalist who once said, ‘If you wish to bet hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible’… To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking…” Max Beckmann
“All our interior world is reality — and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.” Marc Chagall
“I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter... I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality.”
“Whatever interest the accidents of time, religion, custom, or history may have given one in the representation of the particular, nothing is worth the understanding of the universal agency of air, the model of the infinite.” Theodore Rousseau 1812-1867
“There can be no schools; there are only painters.” Gustave Courbet
“I know that there is no such thing
as a straight road.
Only a vast labyrinth
of intricate crossroads.” Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish, 1899-1936
“However far you go, you will never find the boundaries of the soul.” Heraclitus, Greek, 6th-5th century B.C.
“Inexorable is the saying, ‘However much the river winds it finds the sea at last.’” Kai Lung
“Anything can be turned to beauty.”
“I have a feeling that sooner or later I shall arrive at something legitimate, only I must begin, not with hypotheses, but with specific instances, no matter how minute.” Paul Klee 1879-1940
“It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.” Titian 1483-1576
“The only thing is to see.” Rodin 1840-1917