Blog

For this month I thought I'd take a pause from my own thoughts on painting to post a few quotes from some of the artists and teachers I've admired for so many years. These timeless words of wisdom I found inspiring when I first read them, and they still speak to me today. Enjoy-- Laura

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How many attempts, now happy, now unhappy!... He who has not felt the difficulties of his art does nothing that counts. (Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin)

(T)o make a painting representing things as they are found in nature . . . (I) put a great deal of thought into the arrangement, but with the idea of making it look like a natural arrangement of random objects. This is an idea that I have been mulling over a great deal: giving the appearance of a total lack of artistry.” Fantin-Latour

"Beauty is ever present like the light of the sun – even in the most humble object, only it takes as artist’s vision to detect it, and an artist’s skill to reproduce it." -- Emil Carlsen

One must know how to work hard for a long time, but in such a manner that nobody would notice the amount of labor and sweat on that painting.

⁠— Valentin Serov

Do not imagine that I would disregard that thing that lies beneath the mask...but be sure that when the outside is rightly seen, the thing that lies under the surface will be found upon your canvas -- William Merritt Chase

“The artist must never forget that he is dealing with the entire canvas, and not with any one section of it. Regardless of what he sets out to paint, the problem remains one and the same. With his own creative originality, he must fill in his canvas and make of it an organic whole.” --- Nicolai Fechin

“Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.”  — John Singer Sargent

In art, all that is not indispensable is unnecessary.

— Carolus Duran

Starting with a note of truth in a picture is the important thing — the first color you put down influences you right straight through. Do not put things down approximately — you will take a wrong thing and unconsciously key everything to it, making it all false.

— Charles W. Hawthorne

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.”

“The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” 

― Robert Henri