Still Life Quotes

• It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Art, Flower, Appreciate

  57 Copy quote

• Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?

  Richard Corliss

  Beauty, Artist, Essence

  53 Copy quote

• Life is still life. It’s still tough, complicated, and more than a little messy, with lessons to be learned, mistakes to be made, triumphs and disappointments to be had, and not every day is meant to be a party.

  Alyson Noel

  Disappointment, Mistake, Party

  11 Copy quote

• ... life, by definition, is never still.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Life, Definitions, Stills

  Kurt Vonnegut (2009). “Bluebeard: A Novel”, p.90, Dial Press

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• My still-life painting has more to do with light and shadow than with the objects themselves.

  William C. Wright

  Light, Shadow, Painting

  7 Copy quote

• I love painting still lifes because there's a feeling of musical, flowing experience. The drawing doesn't matter as much - what you're really after is a feeling of clarity and beauty.

  Jacob Collins

  Drawing, Feelings, Musical

  7 Copy quote
• 

  Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

  Dorothea Lange

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  100 Copy quote

• Still ending, and beginning still.

  William Cowper

  Life, Stills

  William Cowper (1849). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, Esq., Including the Copyright Poems, with a Life of the Author, from the Edition of Robert Southey”, p.222

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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

  10 Copy quote

• What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

  Chuck Close

  Photography, Differences, Doe

  8 Copy quote

• The successful painter is continually painting still life.

  Charles Webster Hawthorne

  Successful, Painting, Painter

  4 Copy quote

• Still, life had a way of adding day to day

  Virginia Woolf

  Way, Stills, Day To Day

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.96, Broadview Press

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• I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

  Giorgio Morandi

  Art, Privacy, Kind

  Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (2007). “Giorgio Morandi: works, writings and interviews”, Poligrafa Ediciones Sa

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• Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

  Jodi Picoult

  Memories, Eye, Artist

  Jodi Picoult (2007). “Vanishing acts”, p.497, Simon and Schuster

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• In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

  Mark Twain

  Flower, Years, Twenties

  Mark Twain (1976). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume I: (1855-1873)”, p.105, Univ of California Press

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• Life is still life, whatever its pangs; our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles must be silenced.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Eye, Ears, Sound

  Charlotte Bronte (2016). “Villette”, p.264, Xist Publishing

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• I put it [picture "A still life of a pear" by Edouard Manet] there [on the wall, next to the picture "Jupiter and Thetis" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres], for a pear like that would overthrow any god.

  Edgar Degas

  Wall, Artist, Jupiter

  Edgar Degas' remark in a conversation with the writer Moore (circa 1875), as quoted in Sue Roe "The Private Lives of the Impressionists" (p. 117), 2006.

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• What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Landscape, Figures

  "Matisse on Art".

  10 Copy quote

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• landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

  Patricia Hampl

  Stories, Landscape, Beloved

  Patricia Hampl (1993). “Spillville: A Collaboration”, Milkweed Editions

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• When you are modelling, you are creating a picture, a still life, perhaps something like a silent film. You convey emotion but you are only using your body.

  Helena Christensen

  Silent Films, Creating, Body

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day

  Virginia Woolf

  Hot, Way, Sun

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.96, Broadview Press

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• When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.

  Arthur Koestler

  Stress, Player, Curves

  13 Copy quote

• I'm going to get down to a still life on a size 50 canvas of rayfish and dogfish with old fishermen's baskets. Then I'm going to turn out a few pictures to send wherever possible, given that now, first and foremost - unfortunately - I have to earn some money.

  Claude Monet

  Money, Firsts, Size

  Claude Monet (2014). “Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters”, Chartwell

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• Of no distemper, of no blast he died,
  But fell like autumn fruit that mellow'd long:
  Even wonder'd at, because he dropp'd no sooner.
  Fate seem'd to wind him up for fourscore years;
  Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more;
  Till like a clock worn out with eating time,
  The wheels of weary life at last stood still.

  John Dryden

  Life, Fate, Autumn

  "Oedipus: A Tragedy".

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• I loved you ere I knew you; know you now,
  And having known you, love you better still.

  Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

  Life, Love You, I Loved You

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