Composition Quotes - Page 2

• When you feel like putting something into your picture or do not know what is the matter with it, take something out.

  Harvey Dunn

  Matter, Feels, Knows

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• The adventure of composition is a mystery. The muse has her ways, she hides from you, comes for you in the middle of the night, at midday, at dawn. You must believe wholeheartedly in this divine power. Its an elusive gift that can appear at any time, anywhere. Artists are in awe of it.

  Mickey Hart

  Believe, Adventure, Artist

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• This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Real, Essence

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• Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

  Kazimir Malevich

  Painting, Consciousness, Shameless

  1915 Manifesto, quoted in C Gray The Russian Experiment in Art (rev edn1986).

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• A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Inspiring, Artist, Creative

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• Watch the greater image materialize. You need that thing over there to tell you what to do about that thing over here.

  Robert Genn

  Watches, Needs, Greater

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• And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done

  Pierre Bonnard

  Drawing, Done, Half

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• Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Taken, Suits

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1973). “Matisse on art”

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• To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Light, Ideas

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• There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.

  William Shatner

  Drama, Texture, Film

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• Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Artist, Imagination, Taste

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• The more composed scenes are like elevator music compared to some of the more dynamic styles of music. One is not better than the other. They both deserve their spots in the world.

  Jean Wilson

  Style, World, Scene

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• I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Important, Able, Painting

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• 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.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Taken, Landscape Painting, Lines

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• The composition happens as the work progresses. Often the messy background makes it easy to disperse shapes as needed. I'd rather it took over me than I took over it.

  Myfanwy Pavelic

  Progress, Shapes, Easy

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• Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

  William Shenstone

  Writing, Long, House

  William Shenstone (1764). “The Works in Verse and Prose, of William Shenstone, Esq: Most of which Were Never Before Printed ...”, p.170

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• Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out.

  Morris Graves

  Color, Ideas, Mind

  "Morris Graves, the early works". Book by Theodore F. Wolff, published by Whitney Museum of American Art, p. 28, 1998.

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• Composition has almost always been solitary.

  Wendy Carlos

  Solitary

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• Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Book, Writing

  Edward Gibbon (1814). “The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings”, p.56

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• Painting is still to a great extent dominated by a central image; corners in most cases are like uninvited guests at a party, uneasy and unattended.

  Harold Town

  Party, Guests, Painting

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• I usually have an immediate recognition of the potential image, and I have found that too much concern about matters such as conventional composition may take the edge off the first inclusive reaction.

  Ansel Adams

  Firsts, May, Matter

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• A curiosity prompt heightens the senses and hones compositional ability.

  Robert Genn

  Curiosity, Ability, Prompts

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• Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

  James Thurber

  Native American, Rewards, Comedy

  "A Thurber Garland". Book by James Thurber. Preface, 1955.

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• You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

  Roy Lichtenstein

  Reality, Thinking, Ideas

  "New Again: Roy Lichtenstein". Interview with David Bowie, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 20, 2012.

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• The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

  Cyril Connolly

  Running, Taken, Air

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.107, University of Chicago Press

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