“Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be.”

— Patrick Swift

The Artist Speaks (1951)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in …" by Patrick Swift?

Patrick Swift 60

British artist 1927–1983

Related quotes

“The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Article in The Saturday Evening Post, 1968 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxsfAQAAMAAJ&q=%22The+drive+toward+complex+technical+achievement+offers+a+clue+to+why+the+U.S.+is+good+at+space+gadgetry+and+bad+at+slum+problems%22&pg=PA86

“Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist; but the blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art.”

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist

The Art of Measurement (1525).

“Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist.A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.”

Juan Gris (1887–1927) Spanish painter and sculptor

Quote from 'On the Possibilities of Painting,' lecture, Sorbonne (1924-05-15)

“There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.”

S.M. Stirling book Conquistador

Conquistador (2003)

“Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.”

Susan Sontag book Under the Sign of Saturn

Fascism" http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm"Fascinating (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 92, ISBN 0312420080

“Pictures have their skeleton, muscles, and skin like human beings. One may speak of the specific anatomy of the picture. A picture representing 'a naked person' must not be created by the laws of human anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 840, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910