Canvas Quotes - Page 18

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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" - still the "darkness" is majestic.

  John Constable

  Art, Sunshine, Darkness

  Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), "John Constable's Correspondence," ed. R.B. Beckett, vol. 3, p. 122, 1962-1970.

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• I am glad you encouraged me with the 'Stoke' [his painting 'Stoke-by-Nayland', circa 1835] What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o'clock, after a slight shower during the night, to enhance the dews in the shadowed part of the picture, under 'Hedge row elms and hillocks green.' Then the plough, cart, horse, gate, cows, donkey, &c. are all good paintable material for the foreground, and the size of the canvas sufficient to try one's strength, and keep one at full collar.

  John Constable

  Summer, Morning, Horse

  "Constable". Book by Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Tate Gallery Publications, London, p. 380, Letter to William Purton (6 February 1836), 1993.

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• The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.

  Arthur Symons

  London, Mist, Subtle

  Arthur Symons (1998). “Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands”, p.162, Northwestern University Press

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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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• [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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• It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.

  Nelson Shanks

  Exercise, Oil, Boredom

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• I've started to experiment [in the studio] with texturing the canvas, building up the surface with large brushes, palette knife or fingers. I want to say more in my art.

  T. Allen Lawson

  Art, Building Up, Knives

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• Sometimes, in a portrait, I go straight in with paint onto canvas... Other than riding my bike up and down the hills around here, it is the most dangerous thing I do... like tightrope-walking without a safety net!

  David Cobley

  Safety, Portraits, Riding

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• I then discovered the Pop Art of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Peter Max. I was inspired that these fun and colourful images could be presented seriously on canvas.

  Joe Average

  Art, Fun, Max

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• When I get a script and do my work, and then show up on set and work, it's the same zone that I'm in when I'm in front of a canvas, or when I'm writing a story about one of my paintings, or when I'm playing music. Whatever I'm doing at any given time, it's the same exact zone.

  Michael Marisi Ornstein

  Writing, Playing Music, Stories

  Source: collider.com

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• When an artist wants to paint a painting, they have all those things in their head that they want to portray on a canvas. It's the same thing when I'm pitching. I have all these thoughts going through my head about how I want to pitch: which pitch I want to throw here, and why do I want to throw it?

  Justin Verlander

  Artist, Want, Pitching

  "Q&A: David Ortiz and Justin Verlander". Interview with David Laurila, www.fangraphs.com. June 8, 2012.

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• Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real love-liness.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Beauty, Real, Heart

  John Greenleaf Whittier (1866). “Literary recreations and miscellanies”, p.366

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• All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre - love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché - already seen and expected.

  Edouard Boubat

  Photography, Sight, Encounters

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• 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

  Art, Soul, Teeth

  New York Arts Magazine, December 2008.

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• Movies are a medium of expression like a symphony orchestra...or a painter's brush and canvas.

  Walt Disney

  Expression, Symphony, Orchestra

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• There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"

  Buffy Sainte-Marie

  Eye, Exercise, College

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It's like painting the same blank canvas over and over and over and over and over. Once the concept is known, you don't need to see two. And that was in the back of my head, that I was really done artistically with what I had created or pastiched.

  Steve Martin

  Two, Needs, Done

  Source: bolstablog.wordpress.com

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• I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence -- you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform.

  Alice Neel

  Art, Drawing, People

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• In the desert, the two primary elements are stone and water. Stone comes in abundance, exposed by weathering and a lack of vegetation. It is a canvas. Water crosses this stone with such rarity and ferocity that it tells all of its secrets in the shapes left behind.

  Craig Childs

  Two, Water, Secret

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• 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, but once paint hits canvas, I develop Parkinson's.

  Daniel Tosh

  Funny, Stupid, Struggle

  "Daniel Tosh: Happy Thoughts". www.imdb.com. 2011.

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