Quotes about patina

A collection of quotes on the topic of patina, news, life, likeness.

Quotes about patina

“In particular, this question, to the sculptor:
If a drawing is traced, even with the greatest precision, from another drawing, you will perceive that the one is a copy. Although the differences may deviate less than half a hair, recognizable only by perceptual sensitivity, unanimously we rule the work of the intruder's hand as non-art.
But where is the line of true art—when the sculptor's process often introduces the hands of a plaster caster, the mold maker, the grinder and the polisher, and the patina applier, all these processes and foreign hands intruding deviations upon what was once the original work?”

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

1950s <br class="br">Source: 'Questions to Students', one from a long list of questions, in an undated typescript among the David Smith Papers; probably written c. 1953-54; as quoted at website David Smith State http://www.davidsmithestate.org/statements.html

Art, Question, Drawing

“There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without regard for the individuals and species that compose it. More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct, but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, have continued for more than three billion years. …trillions of communicating, evolving microbes. The visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm's activities.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

Life, World, Communication

“Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. … by ‘modernity’ I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. … if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new – that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I’m not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta’s alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It’s this quality I’m trying to get at when I speak of modernity. … modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature – in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

citation needed
On Modernity

Life, Way, Mountain, Idea

“…but defining their sound was Little Girls, an exuberant ska wrapped in an electronic patina, with modernist vocals à la XTC and a touch of dementia.”

Piero Scaruffi (1955) Italian writer

Oingo Boingo The History Of Rock Music http://www.scaruffi.com/vol4/oingo.html

Girl

“The moods of the dark night skies are variously represented like soft black velvet, like the shining black of a scarab beetle, like the patina-ed surface of Indian-inked paper, soft blotting-paper soaked in dark blue ink for forty days, like a black cat's fur shining in moonlight…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Cats, Mood, Night

“Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria have evolved from organisms that were. …Gene exchanges were indispensable to those that would rid themselves of environmental toxins. …Replicating gene-carrying plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny of bacteria. It still is.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

What is Life? (1995)

Life, Universe

“Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin [French paint], bidet, small phonograph.... objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11).... The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote, 1920's; MPC p. 13; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 28
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting