Surface Quotes - Page 39

• Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

  Samuel Beckett

  Reality, Realism, Skepticism

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

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• What is it you want your audience to see? Who is your audience? What does surface signify? Does it carry meaning? Do you fully understand and know what you are doing? WHY are you using encaustic?

  Kay WalkingStick

  Doe, Want, Audience

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• I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.

  John French Sloan

  Fall, Thinking, Light

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• I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.

  Euan Uglow

  Color, Two, Trying

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• If things look right on the surface the underside is rarely questioned. However, things may be great in reality, but if one perceives them to be amiss, it is difficult to change that perception.

  Aleatha Romig

  Reality, Perception, Looks

  Aleatha Romig (2013). “The Consequences Series: Box Set”, p.98, Romig Works LLC

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• God made solids, but surfaces were the work of the devil.

  Wolfgang Paul

  Devil, Made

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• By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet.Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil. What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.

  Robert Adam

  Dog, Oil, Rivers

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• If you want to become a fossil, you need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the Earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface.

  Louise Leakey

  Moving, Needs, Earth

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• A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

  Joshua Ferris

  Depth, Easy, Pins

  "Joshua Ferris Reads George Saunders" by Sally Law, www.newyorker.com. August 10, 2009.

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• Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

  Wallace Stegner

  Dream, Memories, Eye

  Wallace Stegner (2013). “Crossing to Safety”, p.16, Penguin UK

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• Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.

  Taryn Simon

  Photography, Honesty, Tired

  Interview with Geoffrey Batchen, Nell McClister, www.museomagazine.com.

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• As you become more rooted inside -- as you drink from this silent stream of life that runs beneath the surface of everything -- as you live from that depth of your own being more and more, then you’ll be able to rise taller and stronger in this world; more than you may have ever thought possible.

  Derek Rydall

  Running, Stronger, Depth

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• There is a strong demand for Michael Jackson's music and merchandise, and that will only increase as more material surfaces in the years following his death.

  Adam Kluger

  Strong, Years, Demand

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• As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.. .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface.

  Hans Arp

  White, Drawing, Black

  "Search for the Real". Book by Hans Hofmann, 1948.

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• Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelle into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue.

  Hans Arp

  Squares, Blue, Color

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• He will see most without who has the best eyes within; and he who only sees with his bodily organs sees but the surface.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Eye, Organs

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• If 'bounded by a surface' is the definition of body there cannot be an infinite body either intelligible or sensible.

  Aristotle

  Body, Definitions, Infinite

  Aristotle (2016). “Physics”, p.73, Aristotle

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• The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mean, Cameras, Doe

  Arts in society, Volume 3, (p. 242), 1964.

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• There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.

  Washington Irving

  Weed, Roots, Tree

  Washington Irving (2015). “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – The Complete Collection: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Voyage, Roscoe, A Royal Poet, A Sunday in London and many more (Illustrated)”, p.133, e-artnow

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• The Mars rover Curiosity has sent back images of some odd things on the surface of Mars, and some people think they could be UFOs. Here's my question. If we're on the surface of Mars, aren't we the UFO?

  Jay Leno

  Thinking, People, Curiosity

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• Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

  Herman Melville

  Space, Dumb, Faces

  Herman Melville (2016). “Pierre; or The Ambiguities”, p.69, Herman Melville

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• In order to understand the phenomena in a certain plasma region, it is necessary to map not only the magnetic but also the electric field and the electric currents. Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure.

  Hannes Alfven

  Distance, Space, Order

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• The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.

  William Golding

  Men, Artist, Two

  William Golding (1983). “Lord of the Flies”, p.220, Penguin

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• The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.

  Max Beerbohm

  Beautiful, Mean, Perfect

  Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.284, New York Review of Books

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• Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Art, Character

  1841 Essays: First Series,'Art'.

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