Canvas Quotes - Page 10

• As an actor, you're a color of paint on someone else's palette. But as a director, it's your canvas and you make the painting you want to make.

  Denzel Washington

  Color, Directors, Actors

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience... so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense.

  Giorgio Vasari

  Venice, Splits, Littles

  Giorgio Vasari (1963). “The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, London : Dent ; New York : Dutton

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• I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, - and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" - my "dews" - my "breezes" - my bloom and freshness, - no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.

  John Constable

  Children, Believe, Light

  Letter to C.R. Leslie (March 1833), from "The Letters of John Constable, R.A. to C. R. Leslie, R.A. 1826-1837", p. 104, 1931.

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• The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs.. .May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work - in spite of everything [a. o. using his bed sheets as canvas for the new paintings].

  Max Beckmann

  War, Blood, Boredom

  "Max Beckmann". Book by Stephan Lackner, 1983.

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• 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

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Expression

  "On my Painting". Max Beckmann's Speech during the exhibition 'Twentieth-Century German Art', London, July 21, 1938.

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• 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

  Kids, Simple, Thinking

  Jackson Pollock, Francis V. O'Connor, Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, Mass.) (1980). “Jackson Pollock: the black pourings, 1951-1953”

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• [PlayStation 2] is a new canvas for humanity that takes us back to our nature.

  Trip Hawkins

  Humanity, Playstation

  "Here Comes Playstation 2". www.newsweek.com. March 05, 2000.

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• When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

  Wayne Thiebaud

  Real, Thinking, Squares

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• If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay of something we see outside of us with our inner response. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on canvas with paint so that when finished it contains the experience.

  Lawren Harris

  Artist, Views, Sky

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• My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love.

  Robert Genn

  Technology, Hands, Juicy

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• Great paintings have gradations, large and small... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.

  Robert Genn

  Two, Essentials, Painting

  Robert Genn (1996). “The Painter's Keys: A Seminar with Robert Genn”, p.20, Studio Beckett Publications

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• Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Feelings, Landscape, Cups

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• Praise a fool, and slay him; for the canvas of his vanity is spread; His bark is shallow in the water, and a sudden gust shall sink it: Praise a wise man, and speed him on his way; for he carrieth the ballast of humility, And is glad when his course is cheered by the sympathy of brethren ashore.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Wise, Humility, Men

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1857). “Complete poetical works: containing: Proverbial philosophy, A thousand lines, Hactenus, Geraldine, and miscellaneous poems. With a portrait of the author”, p.90

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• I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

  Joan Miro

  Example, Littles, Chance

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• As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.

  Bibhu Mohapatra

  Creative, Want, Blank

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• If you look into the past of the successful painter you will find square miles of canvas behind him.

  Charles Webster Hawthorne

  Success, Past, Squares

  Richard Mühlberger, Charles Webster Hawthorne (1999). “Charles Webster Hawthorne”, University of Washington Press

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• Keep this little canvas, it is a promise for the future. When I say 'keep this canvas,' I mean for the influence on yourself. When one does a good thing, it's well to keep it to show how foolish we are at other times.

  Charles Webster Hawthorne

  Future, Mean, Promise

  Richard Mühlberger, Charles Webster Hawthorne (1999). “Charles Webster Hawthorne”, University of Washington Press

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• [the impression of the first time I heard Webern's music in a concert performance] was the same as I was to experience a few years later when I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality

  Anton Webern

  Eye, Reality, Years

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• Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

  R. D. Laing

  Book, White, Silence

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• There is joy in feeling the bristles of a quality brush, seeing the richness and lush color of truly good pigment flowing onto the paper or canvas. The cheap stuff just makes for harder work and lesser results.

  Gene Black

  Color, Joy, Feelings

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• I have to decide whether I'm just laying down a groove, kind of a bed and canvas for the lyrics and music to live on, or trying to illustrate something in the lyrics.

  Glenn Kotche

  Trying, Bed, Laying Down

  Interview with Grayson Currin, pitchfork.com. June 5, 2006.

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• What's totally terrifying is that, unlike a musician who has a musical instrument, or a painter that's got a canvas and a brush, acting is us. Our energy, our soul, our spirits. And it's so hard because it's so vul­nerable. You're exposing everything.

  Jane Fonda

  Soul, Musical, Acting

  "Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett and Six More Top Actresses on Pay Gap, Sex Scenes and the Price of Speaking Frankly: "There Is Always a Backlash"". Interview by Stephen Galloway, www.hollywoodreporter.com. November 18, 2015.

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• White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge. Bring order to the whole Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony.

  Stephen Sondheim

  Light, Order, White

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• The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

  Jacques-Louis David

  Philosophy, Artist, Should Have

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• Having the courage to dream means following your calling today, in some way, despite the facts in your life that seem to be unmovable obstacles. And then, if your canvas is unfinished at the moment you die, at least you'll die an artist rather than a dabbler who talks about how she or he would truly like to live.

  Alberto Villoldo

  Dream, Mean, Artist

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