Quotes about canvas
page 2

“I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France. This picture will be called 'The Blue Revolution'. It isn’t the fact of my taking power in France that interests me, but rather the possibility of creating a monochrome picture in my new manner: ‘The Refinement of Sensibility’.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1958; p. 43
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“Have you ever heard of anything more stupid than 'abstraction-abstraction'? and they ask me into their deserted house [probably Miro meant the group 'Abstraction-Création', founded by a. o. Jean Arp and André Breton; both coined Miro's art in 1931 as 'mobile' and 'stabile'] as if the marks I put on a canvas did not correspond to a concrete representation of my mind, did not possess a profound reality, were not a part of the real itself.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

1915 - 1940
Source: 'Où allez-vous Miró?', art critic Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 261, nos. 8-10, 1936

Stupidity, Art, Reality, Parting

“One day Pierre Loeb said to me that the ideal picture is one which is completely clear in the artist's mind before he puts a mark on the canvas, and this was, at any rate in this period.... Léger's opinion. It is the basis on which classical art is built. Therefore the setting-down of the picture on the canvas is in itself something quite unimportant. This is connected with [Fernand] Léger's hatred of textural effects in painting. But I love these effects. I remember that I was once told off because I had applied a thick layer of color instead of the thin and even layer that Léger wanted. To him that was not painting but mere color. If he could have got a machine instead of a brush to apply the color, he would have done so.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote in Jorn's letter, 1952; as cited on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255, his critical comment on the art teachings of Fernand Léger, which Jorn started to follow circa 1936, in Paris. 1949 - 1958, Various sources

Love, Art, Color, Painting

“The art of painting is the Art of hollowing out a canvas.”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

from an essay by Roger Fry, in 'The Dial', Camden, New Jersey, September 1926
undated quotes

Art, Painting

“The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jaque, Breton; and that is a good thing.... Well and good: but between you and me, the bourgeois walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas, 'to be brought to the light'... They too are often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come from their offices and from behind their desks... There's a serious and irrefutable argument.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote from Bonnard's letter to Ferdinand Martin, 3 September 1868; as cited in Eugène Boudin, G. Jean-Aubry with Robert Schmit - trans. Caroline Tisdall. Greenwich, Conn., New York Graphic Society, 1968, p. 72
1850s - 1870s

People, Light

“Growing up in such a stunning landscape is inevitably going to have an effect on you, whether you rebel or whether you embrace, because it's so striking. I lived on this rugged, rugged coastline with the North Sea hammering at the cliffs, and the weather changes literally every half hour. My parents met as rock climbers, so they're absolute outdoors fiends, and we were constantly up hills and under canvas and camping and tramping around. They're very fond memories and something I still love to do.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

Barnes & Noble Interview with David Sprague (February 2006).

Love, Parent, Memory, Change

“Later came 'the hour of solitude'. Inside my tiny bedroom-studio, I began my forty days in the desert; I do not know if they are over yet. With a desperate, feverish rage I took formal experimentation to maniacal levels. Each canvas was a battlefield where wounds multiplied ad infinitum. And then came the surprise. All that frenetic movement, all that gesticulation, all that unending dynamism, by dint of the scratches, blows, scars, divisions and subdivisions…. suddenly took a qualitative leap. My eye no longer perceived differences. Everything congealed in a uniform mass. What had been ardent ebullition transformed itself into static silence. It was like a great lesson in humility for the pride of my unbridled quest.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Solitude, Silence, Rage

“…on this September morning in 1812, while the Indomitable held her same course under reduced canvas, the ship's small drummers and fifers marched and countermarched up and down the crowded gundeck, the familiar tune Portsmouth Lass lively enough to set a man's foot tapping, or purse his lips in a silent whistle.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

For My Country's Freedom, Cap 17 "And For What?"

“Today it's possible to paint one canvas with the calmness of an ancient Greek and the next with the anxiety of a Van Gogh. Either of these emotions, and any in between, is valid to me... I work on many canvasses at once. In the morning I line them up against the wall of my studio. Some speak, some do not. They are my mirrors. They tell me what I am like at that moment.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory, William Baziotes, in Possibilities, Vol. I, no. 1, New York, winter 1947-48, p. 2
1940s

Painting

“So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss. Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 140

Happiness, Way, Sleep, Horse

“From now on whatever the hour represented on the canvas, a supreme accord will be wrought amongst all the parts of the subject: the water, the sky, the clouds, the foliage, reunified by the atmosphere, will form a whole of an irreproachable homogeneity, a grandiose and charming image of natural harmony.”

Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926) French writer

1898 in: Steven Z. Levine, ‎Claude Monet (1994), Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self. p. 93: presented as "account at the time of the reexhibition of the seven Cathedrals in 1898."

Nature, Water, Parting

“You wouldn't believe the number of people who hang the electric chair painting in the homes, especially if the colour of the canvas matches the curtains.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

As quoted in Marie Deparis (2009), "Mounir Fatmi: Gardons Espoir / Keeping Faith" (bilingual exhibition notice, as a retranslation from the French "On n'imagine pas le nombre de personnes qui accrocheraient chez elles le tableau de la chaise électrique, surtout si les coloris de la toile s'harmonisent avec les rideaux.")
1968 - 1974, Electric chair quote

People, Home, Painting

“(Gabriël advises her to make both big studies and small ones) [and small studies, ].. for throwing in three curses and a sigh - forgive me that corny expression - impressions and transient effects on the canvas. Observe especially the hue of every occurring moment.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch / citaat van Paul Gabriël, in Nederlands: ..gaat stil uw gang en hebt vertrouwen in hetgeen ik U zeg, vraag nimmer hoe een ander het deed of doet, tracht de natuur te doorgronden, opserveer alles, tracht te leren zien en zoekt U zelve de gemakkelijkste weg om die weer te geven; men kan uit de natuur verschillende keuzen doen, volgt die het hart u zegt, waarvoor gij het meeste voeld.. ..zoek datgeene waar effect in zit, iets wat duidelijk iets zeggen wil.
(Gabriël raadde haar aan zowel grote studies te maken als kleine:) [en de kleine studies,] ..om in drie vloeken en een zucht, vergeeft mij die banale uitdrukking, indrukken, voorbijgaande effecten, op het doek te werpen. Opserveerd vooral goed de toon van elk voorkomend oogenblik.
2 quotes of Paul Gabriël, from his letter in 1882, to Geesje van Calcar, as cited in Geesje van Calcar. Een echte Mesdag, R. en W. Vetter; Schipluiden 2001, p. 18-22
1880's + 1890's

Forgiveness, Study

“You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture... The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Appel is referring to the Italian movie-maker Pasolini
Source: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990), pp. 75-77 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

Love, Making love, Law, Beauty

“If upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red – every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior... If I paint a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow, and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one another..”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1905 - 1910, Notes d'un Peintre' (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 411

Painting

“As ships becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail, at dawn of day
Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

Qua Cursum Ventus. Compare: "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874), Pt. III, The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth, sec. IV.

“I think the reason we [Baziotes himself and Richard Lippold ] begin in a different way, is that this particular time has gotten to a point where the artist feels like a gambler. He does something on the canvas and takes a chance in the hope that something important will be revealed.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Source: 1950s, Artists' Session at Studio 35, (1950), p. 219

Hope, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“Vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms wide, alternate white and colored, are stuck over internal and external surfaces: walls, fences, display windows, etc.; and/or cloth/canvas support, vertical stripes, white and colored bands each 8.7 cms, the two ends covered with dull white paint.
I record that this is my work for the last four years, without any evolution or way out. This is the past: it does not imply either that it will be the same for another ten or fifteen years or that it will change tomorrow.
The perspective we are beginning to have, thanks to these past four years, allows a few considerations of the direct and indirect implications for the very conception of art. This apparent break (no research, or any formal evolution for four years) offers a platform that we shall situate at zero level, when the observations both internal (conceptual transformation as regards the action/praxis of a similar form) and external (work/production presented by others) are numerous and rendered all the easier as they are not invested in the various surrounding movements, but are rather derived from their absence.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

" Beware!" ("Mise en garde!") http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/buren1.pdf, in Konzeption/Conception, translated by Charles Harrison and Peter Townsend (Leverkusen: Stadtischer Museum, 1969. 1960s

Art, Color, Way, Support

“It has happened that I have begun a canvas in a brilliant tonality, going on to finish it in a grey notation. (1898)”

Albert Marquet (1875–1947) French artist

As quoted by J. E. Müller, Le Fauvisme, Paris, Hazan, 1956, p. 92

“Oh, If I had been able to realize you with my hand. If the painted canvas was able to give me your dear image. The labor was you ['The Unknown'] the work of art was me – I have kissed your head, I have looked elsewhere… You are neither good, nor charitable. You do not know how to love. – You are only great and beautiful. I sacrificed to tenderness and still, my self, you do not know how to love.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Love, Beauty, Art, Kiss

“The Pointillist chooses a means of expression by which he applies colour on a canvas in small dots rather than spreading it flat.”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

“Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture… black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Robert Motherwell, in a catalog note to the show Black or White (1950)
Misattributed

Animals, Drawing

“It seems that the first consideration of a painter who stands before the white canvas should be to decide what curves and arabesques should cut the surface, what tints and tones should cover it... Following the precepts of Delacroix he would not begin a composition until he had first determined its organization. Guided by tradition and by science, he would adjust the composition to his conception, that is to say he would adapt the lines (directions and angles), the chiaroscuro (tones), the colors (tints), to the traits he wished to make dominant.”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

Chapt. III.; as quoted by John Rewald, in Georges Seurat', a monograph https://ia800607.us.archive.org/23/items/georges00rewa/georges00rewa.pdf; Wittenborn and Compagny, New York, 1943. p. 21 From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

Color, Science

“Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord, they were born on the canvas; that is why it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

1946 - 1963, interview with John Richardson' (1957)

Bird, Reading, Painting

“People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1950's, Conversations With Artists, 1957

People, Thinking, Painting

“.. when I see people making quote 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough, that is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing, it has to be a trialogue. Whether that third thing - it must be, to reverberate and make trouble, you have to have trouble and contradictions, it has to become complex because life is complex, emotions are complex, - whether that third element is a still life of something, or an idea or a concept, in each case it has to be a trialogue and above all has to involve you.... The real thing that matters is how involved you are in that.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Life, People, Quotes, Idea

“That's my great ambition. To be sure! Every time I attack a canvas I feel convinced, I believe that something's going to come of it... But I immediately remember that I've always failed before. Then I taste blood... I never know where I am going or where I want to go with this damned profession. All the theories mess you up inside.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 206 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Feeling, Time

“I always tell the younger film-makers and students: Do it like the painters used to…Study the old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.”

Martin Scorsese (1942) American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor

Scorsese: A Personal Journey through American Movies.

Study, Learning

“Well, I have a very simple method of painting. It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. It's very simple... Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer... I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Oral history interview with Edward Hopper' (1959, June 17), conducted by John Morse; 'Archives of American Art', Smithsonian Institution

Business, Help, Painting

“By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place... In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Quote by Braque, from 'Le Monologue du Peintre', George Charbonnier, Paris 1959
1946 - 1963

Painting

“If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day: to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model. This is now understood indifferently well – at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the 'Prophète', or the Hugenots' hymn in the opera of that name.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

In a letter to 'The World', London 22 Mai, 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 186
1870 - 1903

Flowers, Tree, Painting, Indifference

“I can not evolve any concrete theory about painting. What happens on the canvas is unpredictable and surprising to me.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Source: Posthumous quotes, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, (1983), p. 135 : original source: 'Willem de Kooning', in 'Moma Bulletin' pp. 6,7

Painting

“For 338 paragraphs the Franks report painted a splendid picture, delineated the light and the shade, and the glowing colours in it, and when Franks got to paragraph 339 he got fed up with the canvas he was painting and chucked a bucket of whitewash over it.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1983/jan/26/falkland-islands-franks-report in the House of Commons (26 January 1983) responding to the Franks Inquiry into intelligence before the Falklands War. Post-Prime Ministerial

Light, Painting

“The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

War, Children, Age, Peace

“The point to be made clear is that, whatever may be our temperament, or our power in the presence of nature, we have to render what we actually see, forgetting everything that appeared before our own time. Which, I think, should enable the artist to express his personality to the full, be it large or small. Now that I am an old man, about seventy, the sensations of colour which produce light give rise to abstractions that prevent me from covering my canvas, and from trying to define the outlines of objects when their points of contact are tenuous and delicate; with the result that my image or picture is incomplete. For another thing, the planes become confused, superimposed; hence Neo-Impressionism (initiated by Seurat and Paul Signac, ed., where everything is outlined in black, an error which must be uncompromisingly rejected. And nature, if consulted, shows us how to achieve this aim.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 23 October 1905; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 180
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Error, Nature, Thinking, Light

“Towards the end of his life, Schumpeter re-painted his picture of capitalist development on an even broader canvas. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter 1950), he offered a complex, multifaceted argument that the type of capitalism he had earlier described might be passing from the historical scene, morphing by small degrees into some variety of socialism.”

Sidney G. Winter (1935) American economist

Dynamic Capability as a Source of Change, 2008

Life, Democracy, Painting

“I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Painting

“Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Richter's aunt had been murdered by the Nazis in the name of euthanasia, a crime for which his father-in-law from his first marriage, a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Eufinger, had been partially responsible. Richter painted a portrait of his aunt in 1965, based on an old photo. It was called 'Tante Marianne' / 9Aunt Marianne).
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

People, Photo, Painting

“.. ambition to surpass Impressionism, destroying the subject's unity of time and place.... [to render its relations to] things that apparently had nothing to do with it, but that in reality were linked to it in my imagination, in my memories or by feeling. In the same canvas I brought together the Arc of Triumph, the Tour Eiffel, the Alps, the head of my father, an autobus, the municipal hall of Pienza, the boulevard…”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Quote from his article 'Processo e difesa di un pittore d'oggi', L'Arte 5, Rome, September – November, 1931; as cited in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 25
quote, referring to his painting 'Memories of a Voyage', Severini painted in 1910-1911.

Feeling, Imagination, Reality, Memory

“My soul is a canvas stretched across four wooden corners and tacked with copper nails that sink into the edges of timber like teeth. My art is nothing less than my salvation.”

Keariene Muizz (1977) American artist

New York Arts Magazine (December 2008)

Art, Soul

“The only control that I excercize [in painting] is to not throw too much paint next to the canvas.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

MR1, 177; p. 215
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

Painting

“He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains…but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Los Viajes" in La Solidaridad (15 May 1889)- translated from the Spanish by Nick Joaquin

Happiness, Music, Travel, Feeling

“My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly — and worse — of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd"”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

still the "darkness" is majestic.
Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett, (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), vol. 3, p. 122; also quoted in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (Westview Press, 1979, ISBN 0-064-30089-7, ch. 3, p. 91
1830s

Art, Painting, Forgetting

“Neo-Impressionist method is an attempt is made to achieve the richness of the sunlight spectrum with all its tones. An orange that blends with yellow and red, a violet that tends toward red and blue, a green between blue and yellow are, with white the sole elements. Through mixture (in the eye of the observer) of these pure colours, whose relationship can be varied at will, from the most brilliant to the greyish. Every brush stroke that is taken from the palette remains pure on the canvas.”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

“The idea for this picture came to me one winter's night as I was leaving La Scala. In the foreground there is a snow sweeper with a few couples, men in top hats and elegant ladies. I think that this canvas, which is totally unknown in Italy, is one of the paintings where I best represented the concept that I had the time about my art.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Source: 1940's, La mia Vita (1945), Carlo Carrà; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger (2008), p. 154 - Carrà is refering in this quote to his painting 'Uscita dal teatro' ('Leaving the theater'), he made in 1909

Men, Art, Idea, Thinking

“Don't you love it when people in school are like, "I'm a bad test taker?" You mean, you're stupid. Oh, you struggle with that part where we find out what you know? Oh. No, no, I can totally relate. See, because I'm a brilliant painter, minus my God-awful brushstrokes. Oh, how the masterpiece is crystal up here[points to head], but once paint hits canvas, I develop Parkinson's. I apologize if there's a Parkinson's painter in the audience. I assume your best work is in the A. M. Probably gets a bit abstract by noon.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

Love, God, People, Stupidity

“I knew nothing when I first met him. He taught me to see things through his eyes. Dalí was my teacher. He let me use his brushes, his paint and his canvas, so that I could play around while he was painting for hours and hours in the same studio. Surrealism was a good school for me. Listening to Dalí talk was better than going to any art school.”

Amanda Lear (1939) singer, lyricist, composer, painter, television presenter, actress, model

http://www.3d-dali.com/centennial-magazine/e-9-muse.htm, Salvador Dali Centennial Magazine – Amanda Lear, 15 June 2004, 3d-dali.com, 15 July 2018

School, Art, Teachers, Painting

“With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words — since marble and canvas inevitably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth….”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 24 : Deals with Pen Scratches

Life, Dreams, Thinking, Sense

“Both the existence of these parallels and their tragic nature would not have escaped Charles Kindleberger, whose World in Depression, 1929-1939 was published exactly 40 years ago, in 1973. Where Kindleberger’s canvas was the world, his focus was Europe. While much of the earlier literature, often authored by Americans, focused on the Great Depression in the US, Kindleberger emphasised that the Depression had a prominent international and, in particular, European dimension. It was in Europe where many of the Depression’s worst effects, political as well as economic, played out. And it was in Europe where the absence of a public policy authority at the level of the continent and the inability of any individual national government or central bank to exercise adequate leadership had the most calamitous economic and financial effects.”

Barry Eichengreen (1952) Economist

J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, "New preface to Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929-1939" http://www.voxeu.org/article/new-preface-charles-kindleberger-world-depression-1929-1939 (2012)

World, Exercises, Literature, Nature

“Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 18-19

Life, Beauty

“Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 170.

Art, Music, Color, Literature

“The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand, forms. New apparitions stalk the earth.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel's excerpt', c. 1953

“I mean that the things I felt and that I enjoyed about certain painters of the past that I liked, that inspired me, like Cézanne and Manet, that thing I enjoyed in their work, that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself, even though it was a picture of a woman in front of a mirror or some dead fish on the table, the pictures of those men were no pictures to me. They felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface. That's truly to me the act of creation.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 66

Men, Fish, Past, Dead

“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

"The American Action Painters" (1952) in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22; then published in Tradition of the New, 1959.

Imagination, Appearance

“Fortunately however, is that [painting] school where Mother Nature is placed in the foreground, and where only she is consulted to representate 'truth' on the canvas or panel. Only he knows the secrets of the manifold diversity of nature. His painting is a faithful copy of nature - which is the highest praise for a painter..”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Gelukkig echter de [schilder]school, waar moeder Natuur op den voorgrond staat, en zij alleen geraadpleegd wordt om 'waarheid' op het doek of paneel voor te stellen. – Hij kent de geheimen van de veelvuldige schakeringen der natuur, zijne schilderij is ene getrouwe kopij der natuur, ziedaar den hoogsten lof, die een schilder kan toegezwaaid worden..
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 27-28

Truth, Secret, School, Faith

“It gives my brain a rest, painting flowers. I don't feel the same tension as when I have a model in front of me. When I paint flowers, I put on colours and try out values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn't dare to do it with a figure; I'd be afraid of spoiling the whole thing. And the experience I gain this way is then applied to my pictures.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 196 : quote on painting flowers, to art-buyer George Riviere, who was watching a flower still-life of Renoir.

Way, Feeling, Flowers, Painting

“A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.”
Magnus gubernator et scisso navigat velo.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXX: On conquering the conqueror, Line 3.

“Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (1971).

Death, Fear, Feeling, Painting

“…the huge Jackson Pollock canvas that is the U. S. A.: vast, murky, splotched and slapped together by a drunk.”

Sarah Vowell book Take the Cannoli

Take the Cannoli (2000)

“But there was something else that the Abstract Expressionists taught us: they began to use something besides the conventional means of art; to want other kinds of paint, or kinds of canvas, or ways of making pictures that weren't the usual ways. Some of the next generation, the Pop Art artists [like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, picked up this attitude and began to put actual things into art. We [=w:Morris Louis and Noland] were making abstract art, but we wanted to simplify the selection of materials, and to use them in a very economical way. To get to raw canvas, to use the canvas un-stretched – to use it in more basic or fundamental ways, to use it as fabric rather than as a stretched surface.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art, Way, Painting

“I recommend [the students] that you should work actively at the Hermitage and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote in a letter of Malevich to his student Yudin, summer of 1924; as quoted in Marc Chagall – the Russian years 1906 – 1922, ed. By Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 66
1921 - 1930

Study

“When I left Paris in 1954, I saw no art that was being 'made' like mine and returning to the U. S. I found no one 'making' art that way either. In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on a canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. unknown : 'Notes from 1969'

Art, Way, Personality

“Released from the land Indomitable heeled over to the thrust of canvas and rudder, the sea almost brushing her lee gunports while she came about, sails thundering as fore and mainsails were hauled and beaten into submission.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

For My Country's Freedom, Cap 5 "Indomitable"

Sea

“It is for the artist.... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Painting

“The aim of art is to get us to dream, just like music, for it expresses a mood projected onto the canvas, which arouses identical sensations in the viewer.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

two short quotes of Picabia, in 'A Paris painter', by Hapgood, published in 'The Globe and Commercial Advertiser', 20 Febr. 1913, p. 8
1910's

Dreams, Art, Music, Mood

“In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
1960s, Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)

Beauty, Way, Perfection

“I do not mean extended, to mean esthetic definition of space. For me, it is a matter of whether the canvas allows me to breathe or not – if the canvas soars into space or if it is earthbound. When it is earthbound it irritates me enormously. I would like to soar in a canvas.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists 1975, p. 91.

“A musical event in Münich has brought me a great dolt.... an evening of chamber-music by Arnold Schoenberg (Vienna).... the audience behaved loutishly, like school brats, sneezing and clearing their throats, when not tittering and scraping their chairs, so it was hard to follow the music. Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.... and also of Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schoenberg], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schönberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a mere remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

In a letter to August Macke (14 January 1911); as quoted in August Macke; Franz Marc: Briefwechsel, Cologne 1965; as quoted in Boston Modern - Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism, Judith Bookbinder, University Press of New England, Hanover and England, 2005, p. 35
Franz Marc visited a concert with music of the composer Arnold Schönberg on 11 Jan. 1911 with Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and others; they played there compositions of Schönberg he wrote in 1907 and 1909: his second string quartet and the 'Three piano pieces'
1911 - 1914

School, Music, Color, Imagination

“I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted [as in her painting 'Chairman of the Board', 1971].... That 'negative' space has just as active a role as the 'positive' painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Quote from 'The collection', MOMA, online 1 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80139 1990s - 2000s

Painting

“We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land…. The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Written in 1935, recalling her family’s migration from drought-stricken South Dakota to the Missouri Ozarks in 1894; the 650-mile trip had taken them six weeks.
As quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 1, by William V. Holtz (1993).

World, Family, Hope, Travel

“I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing – and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quote from Pollock's letter to Alfonso A. Ossorio and Edward Dragon (1951); as quoted in Abstract Expressionism (1990) by David Anfam, p. 175
1950's

Thinking, Drawing

“I have learned from experience that it is useful to begin by drawing one's picture clearly on a virgin canvas, first having noted the desired effect on a white or gray paper, and then to do the picture section by section, as immediately finished as one can, so that when it has all been covered there is very little to retouch. I have noticed that whatever is finished at one sitting is fresher, better drawn, and profits more from many lucky accidents, while when one retouches this initial harmonious glow is lost. I think that this method is particularly good for foliage, which needs a good deal of freedom.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1828, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 239 – 240
1820 - 1850

Thinking, Freedom, Learning, Drawing

“Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[, ] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[. ] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it]..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris 7-14 October 1862 to James Whistler; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1075&nameid=Manet_E&sr=0&surname=&firstname=&rs=1 - System Number: 01075; Call Number: MS Whistler F 6.

Law, Way, Feeling, Mathematics

“You please me much by saying that no other fault [in the portrait Gainsborough recently made and sent] is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance.... I urn [earn? ] much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of..”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in Gainborough's letter, March 1758 from Ipswich, to a correspondent in the neighbouring town of Colchester; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, pp. 20-21 1755 - 1769

Thinking, Parting, Hurt, Drawing

“After doing the imaginary landscapes until say 1956, in ’57 I came out with the first Burst painting… There was a different type of space than I had ever used and it was a further clarification of what I was trying to do. The thing that was interesting that it was a return to a focal point, but it was a focal point with the kind of space that existed in traditional painting. Because this was like a solitary image or two images that were just floating in the canvas space. They had to hold the space and they also had to create all the movement – that took place within the rectangle.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Source: 1960s, Interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1967, p. 55-59.

Painting

“We are all spawned from the same great canvas yet we lose ourselves through the melding of its vistas.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Shared on social media on June 28, 2018.
Quotes as Marcil d'Hirson Garron

“All is so calm and chaste, so like a dream.
That looking at this masterpiece of God, I ask myself
Where is there a painter, an artist so supreme,So profoundly wise as to unfurl
A canvas with a more arresting scene,
More delicate and beautiful in this World?”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Tudo é tranquilo e casto e sonhador...
Olhando esta paisagem que é uma tela
De Deus, eu penso então: Onde há pintorOnde há artista de saber profundo,
Que possa imaginar coisa mais bela,
Mais delicada e linda neste Mundo?
Juvenilia: versos inéditos de Florbela Espanca (1946), p. 56
Translated by John D. Godinho
Juvenília (1931), No meu Alentejo

God, World, Beauty, Dreams

“Bill [=Willem de Kooning ] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

he painted in 1946 1972 - 1989 Source: an tape-recorded interview with Elaine de Kooning on August 27, 1981 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-elaine-de-kooning-11999; conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Oral Histories.

Books, Feeling, Light, Animals

“If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaughts of cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general laws of violence of the picture... These force-lines must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Source: 1912, Les exposants au public', 1912, p. 8.

Law, Painting, Personality

“I work a lot and I think a lot. I really want to try to paint on glass.. Please will you ask him [mr. architect Taut ] if there are any transparent colors, which one can use to paint on the glass directly... I want to dispose of a new technique in which the artist can paint on the glass directly instead of canvas. When one wants to reach colors spiritually-bright, then a time will come that oil-paint and canvas are no longer suitable... So, if you have time, please ask Mr. Taut if he understands my view and maybe he knows the ways how I can follow my direction.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from German, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(original version, written by Jacoba in German:)Ich arbeite sehr viel und denke sehr viel. Ich möchte so gern versuchen, auf Glas zu mahlen. .. ..bitte fragen sie ihn dann [Herr Taut] ob es transparante Farbe gibt, womit man gleich auf Glas malen kann. .. ..ich möchte eine neue Technik haben, dass der Künstler so direkt das Glas verwenden kann statt Leinwand. Wenn man die Farben leuchtend geistlich haben will, dann wird es eine Zeit kommen, dass Oelfarben und Leinwand sich dafür nicht mehr eignen.. ..So wenn Sie Zeit haben, fragen Sie dann Herrn Taut ob er meine Idee versteht und vielieich den Weg kennt, den ik gehen müsse.
in a letter to Herwarth Walden, 11 Nov. 1914; as cited by Arend H. Huussen Jr. in Jacoba van Heemskerck, kunstenares van het Expressionisme, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 1982, p. 19
It was not until April 1918 that Jacoba wrote Walden she had decided to submit a series of designs for stained glass windows for the upcoming 'Sturm' exhibition - in April 1919 she sent him ten stained-glass windows, 'Nrs. 12-26'
1910's

Color, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“The painter paints his brushes black
Through the canvas runs a crack
Portrait of the pain never answers back.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

"The Flower Lady" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/flower-lady.html Pleasures of the Harbor (1967)

Pain, Painting

“My good Mama, I am always the same.... always the same happy life, always fresh for seeing, vigorous for running, and diligent for one end... The Mont Blanc is our alarm clock in the morning, our vis-a-vis are the folk on the other side of the lake of Geneva, (8 leagues). I could not say that we get along badly, though we do dispense with the ceremony of saluting each other and saying bon jour when we look out at the window, for we don't meddle in our neighbors' affairs. Our sight carries fifty leagues about us, and we are equally everywhere, although only occupying the space of our two feet. I am delighted with having received my stretchers in order to commence my view of the Alps. I burn with the desire of fulfilling the difficult task of giving upon canvas an idea of the immensity which surrounds me in order to distribute its benefits to those less fortunate than myself... I ask without scruple, because it seems to me that I have something to give. I have so much confidence in myself, mon Dieu, when I examine myself.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

Quote of Th. Rousseau, in a letter to his mother, late Summer 1834, from the Alps, Switzerland; as cited in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, pp. 152-53
1830 - 1850

Life, Happiness, Confidence, Idea

“When entering a studio the most pleasant thing to see is a blank canvas. It looks so inviting to make a start, you are fresh and hoping for the best. Then a terrible time follows when everything seems lost and ruined, you fear you will never get it done, than suddenly a ray of light! And it seems you get what you wanted to tell. My best works usually are going trough such a struggle.”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018 (version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Het meest aangename te zien wanneer men een atelier betreedt is een leeg doek. Het oogt zo uitnodigend om een begin te maken, je bent fris en hoopt op het beste. Dan volgt een vreselijke tijd waarin alles verloren en verprutst lijkt, je vreest dat je het nooit zal maken, en plotseling een lichtstraal! En het lijkt alsof je krijgt dat wat je wilde vertellen. Mijn beste werken gaan doorgaans door zulk een strijd. Mauve's remark, later quoted by Mauve's student nl:Arina Hugenholtz, in her In memoriam mr. Anton Mauve, RKD Den Haag; as cited in The land of Mauve: utopia or a reality? / Het land van Mauve: utopie of werkelijkheid? https://www.rug.nl/research/kenniscentrumlandschap/mscripties/christina_vlasma-het_land_van_mauve-masterscriptie.pdf; master-scriptie by Christina van Staats-Vlasma; Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, La Broquerie, Manitoba Canada, Nov. 2010, p. 93 undated quotes

Fear, Hope, Light, Time

“All my life I've been working on the work - every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so as an approximation keeps you going.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited by Grace Glueck, in 'Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies', by Grace Glueck, 'New York Times, 18 July 1991 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/18/obituaries/robert-motherwell-master-of-abstract-dies.html Undated

Life, Beauty

“[the canvas.. ] rubbing in with a handful of straw, with a rag, a scrubbing brush, a Majorcan brush for applying white, with the hand, etc.... [a drawing in a] gigantic rhythm like that of a waterfall cascading down a mountainside.... [works based on] pure signs begun in Varensgeville and finished in Palma.... [with a picture ground of] blue vitriol [a pesticide] that they use for the vines and that splashes against the walls of the farmhouse..”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miro describes his 'attacks' on the canvas
Quote of Miró in his 'Working notes, 1941 – 1942'; as cited in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
1940 - 1960

Drawing

“He is like an angel who floats for a little while on this planet and touches with his wings the canvas.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Angels

“The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Hopper's answer to journalists - quoted by Sherry Maker, in 'Edward Hopper' (1990)
1941 - 1967

“I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 1

Money, People, Art, Painting

“Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.”

Bob Ross (1942–1995) American painter, art instructor, and television host

Alessandra Stanley (December 22, 1991) "Television: Bob Ross, the Frugal Gourmet of Painting", The New York Times, Section 2; Page 33; Column 1; Arts & Leisure Desk.

Time, Painting

“What I really want to do, it seems, is to paint a single form in the middle of a canvas... That's all a painter is, an image maker, is he not? And one would be a fool, some kind of fool, to want to paint a picture. The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is after all what a face is. This happens constantly on a picture. I remember last year I became so nervous about what I was doing that I finally reduce it down to the can on the palette with brushes in it. Well, that's real, tat can with brushes. And I painted the an with brushes sticking in it, and I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't face it. It was as if it didn't contain enough of my thoughts or feelings about it.... I became signs. Exactly.... It seemed to become signs and symbols and I don't like signs.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 95

Fools, Feeling, Painting

“I was very interested in the reproductions of your [ Calder's ] sculptures. I have looked at them many times [Calder sent him], and they are something completely unexpected. You are taking a path full of great possibilities. Bravo! Sculpture is of enormous interest to me right now. For the last two years [1944-46], during summer vacation, that's all I have been doing and it's very good for a painter to get away from the old story of canvas and frame every now and again.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

In a letter to his friend Calder, Barcelona, 18 March 1946; as quoted in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 268
1940 - 1960

Time, Summer

“[to Mondrian:] Maybe you should take all these red, yellow and blue elements off the canvas and let them hang in the air, so they can move. [Mondrian reacted: 'Well, I think my paintings are fast enough already..”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Quote (1930), from a studio-visit at Mondrian's place in Paris, as cited by by Mondrian's recent biographer Hans Janssen, of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague; as cited by Alastair Sooke, in 'Mondrian - the Joy of Being Square'; BBC culture, 10 July 2017 http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170710-mondrian-the-joy-of-being-square 1930s - 1950s

Thinking, Painting

“I am most anxious to get into my London painting-room, for I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas. I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that among the rest.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (23 October 1821), as quoted in Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock (Thames and Hudson, London, 1963), p. 41
1820s

Painting

“It's like this - you are in front of your canvas, you hand holds the paint, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white - but all the time it knows what it wants. So - what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when - with my hands holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms - I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel's excerpt', c. 1953

Life, Time, Waiting, Painting

“My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quote from 'Possibilities' Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947-48, p. 79; as cited in 'Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?', in 'Life' (8 August 1949), pp. 42-45
1940's

Way, Feeling, Parting, Painting

“Around 1950-51… I was finally getting away from the pictographs and looking for something… So it was necessary to find other forms, a different changed concept. So finally after a certain period of transition I hit on dividing the canvas into two parts, which then became like an imaginary landscape… What I was really trying to do when I got away from the pictographs was to make this notion of the kind of polarity clearer and more extreme. So the most extreme thing that I could think of doing at the time was dividing the canvas in half, make two big divisions and put something in the upper division and something in the lower section. So I painted that way… I would say roughly from 1952 to 56/57. About five years.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Source: 1960s, Interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1967, p. 55-59.

Way, Thinking, Change, Time

“.. I let myself go.. [in Kandinsky's Murnau-period when he was painting in open air; c. 1908 – 1914] I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas with the knife and made them sing out as strongly as I could. Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

'..stripes and spots with the knife', as he learned then also Gabriele Münter - they frequently painted together in open air
Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 31

Tree, Light, Strong, Memory

“We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe's prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead."”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.
J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

Life, Art, Color, Dead

“The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer — meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 4 : Creativity and the Encounter, p. 79

World, Reality, Time, Waiting

“Merz paintings are abstract works of art. The word 'Merz' essentially means the totality of all imaginable materials that can be used for artistic purposes and technically the principle that all of these individual materials have equal value. Merz art makes use not just of paint and canvas, brush and palette, but all the materials visible to the eye and all tools needed.... the wheel off a pram, wire mesh, string and cotton balls – these are factors of equal value to paints. The artist creates by choosing, distributing and reshaping the materials.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1910s
Source: 'Merz Painting' (1919); as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 91.

Art, Imagination, Painting

Quotes about canvas page 2

Quotes about canvas
page 2