A landscape painting is essentially emotional in origin. It exists as a record of an effect in nature whose splendour has moved a human heart, and according as it is well or ill done it moves the hearts of others.
Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.
Let it not be assumed that the artist is so smug as to dislike true criticism. No sincere artist was ever completely satisfied with his labour.
A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.
Style is instinctive and few achieve it in a notable degree. Its development is not hastened by instruction. It comes or it doesn't. It will take care of itself.
The beauty and wonders of nature are as alluring as the pursuit of Art, and made of me a landscape painter.
Beauty may be perceived in any scene by one with sympathy and understanding. Beauty is in the mind.
Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.
The play of sunlight is amusement enough for a lazy man.
Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult - so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily.
Be content with nothing less than perfection.
Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
It is remarkable how very individual technique becomes in watercolour. Every man of personality finally arrives at a method peculiarly his own, as unique as his own fingerprint.
When spring is here the sketcher begins to look over his equipment and relishes in anticipation the soothing hours he will spend in the open, warmed by the sun, fanned by the breeze, charmed by the manifold delights of nature.
Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.
Beauty, pleasure, and the good things of life are intensified, and perhaps only exist, by reason of contrast.
It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.
However exquisite the contours or the colours of clouds, trees, rivers or hills, may be in themselves, they must be sacrificed if they do not conform with the general plan.
The character of the subject must influence the choice of the method of its representation.
Every successful painter has worked hard. He cannot rest after having gained a certain degree of facility in drawing, and expect to retain it. He must advance or fall behind. Without practice he will forget; his eye will fail him; and his hand will deny its master.
Do not think me fussy when I specify tidiness. It is essential... In printing, remember that cleanliness and order wait upon success.
Artists are perennially implored to consider 'the limitations of the medium.' Whoever invented this expression exaggerated the limitations of the English language. We are not concerned with what effects cannot be produced with our materials.
The portrait painter... If he insults his sitters his occupation is gone. Whether he paints the should instead of the features, or the latter with all its natural blemishes, he is as presumptuous as if he shouted, 'What a face. Hide it.' which would never do, although it is analogous to what landscape painters are doing every day.
Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty!
It is evident that no derivative laws can teach the young student to see and apprehend colour in nature. His perception needs development as urgently as his muscles.
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