Quotes on Learning to Paint
I am still learning. – Michelangelo
The only way to learn to paint is by painting – Charles Hawthorne
Learning is experience. Everything else is just information. ― Albert Einstein
Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid. – Joseph Campbell
The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing. – Marc Chagall
I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant. – Paul Cezanne
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence. – Abigail Adams
What we want to do we will do well. – William Zinsser
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. – Picasso
Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else. – Sydney Clemens
The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons. – David Hockney
One of the most striking features of adult students is their anxiety that they might be making themselves look foolish, or that they might be exposing themselves to failure. – Jenny Rogers, Adults Learning.
Learning is most often considered. a process of getting rather than giving. This is most evident in conceptions of student/teacher roles: Teachers give and students get. Yet, in adult learning both giving and getting are critical. – David Kolb
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” – Confucius
Play
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. – George Bernard Shaw
Study is the teacher of knowledge, but play and improvisation are the teachers of skill. Make as many paintings as you can, and let yourself enjoy the process of painting, and your progress will follow a natural and unique course. – Bruce McEvoy, Handprint.com
Learning is experience. Everything else is just information. ― Albert Einstein
Painting is full of surprises. Play with them. It’s called inspiration – Adam Cope
The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, the feeling that whatever happens, it’s okay… you’re either free to play, or you’re not. – John Cleese
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. – Carl Jung
As artists we make such a big deal about creating something ‘good’, something ‘pleasing’. We want everyone to love our creations in order to confirm our existence. Our insecurities, hopes and fears haunt us. Either we feel we lack the ability to create or we use art as a means to solidify ourselves: “Look here, my art is in the Guggenheim!” “Look at my resume, I danced with the Russian Ballet!” Don’t let your insecurities rob you of your trust! Just remember, this natural energy created the entire universe – a humbling thought that puts our own artistic creations in perspective! Think: “The universe is here! Where did it come from?” Then have some trust and let this natural energy express itself. – Kongtrul Jigme Namgyel
First Steps…
To begin, begin. – William Wordsworth
The important thing is somehow to begin. – Henry Moore
A good beginning, a good middle & a good end. – Adam Cope
Buy a paint-box, and have a try. When I die and go to heaven, I want to spend the first million years painting — so I can get to the bottom of the subject. – Winston Churchill
Take the first step, and your mind will mobilize all its forces to your aid. But the first essential is that you begin. Once the battle is started, all that is within and without you will come to your assistance. – Robert Collier
You don’t know how discouraging it is to stare at a white canvas that says to the painter: ‘You are capable of nothing’; the canvas seems idiotic, and this fascinates some painters to such an extent that they themselves become idiotic. Many painters are afraid of the white canvas, but the white canvas is afraid of the true, passionate painter who dares – and has overcome the fascination of this ‘you are capable of nothing’. _ Van Gogh to Theo
If the farmer worries himself with the question
Of how the sown grain transforms itself in the summer,
He will get nowhere. The Earth gives forth.
– Rilke, Sonnet to Orpheus
Mistakes?
There are no mistakes, only tracks of where you have been to get where you are. – Robert Kaupelis
The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them. – Kimon Nicolaides
Experience is what you get while looking for something else. – Federico Fellini
Even carelessness can be read as confidence. It’s better to make a mistake and leave it, than paint something very labored. – Joseph Zbukvic
A painting is a conglomeration of failings. But, we can say this of life also. – Anselm Kiefer
One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. – Bayles & Orland, Art & Fear
No matter what a budding artist’s background, education, or point of view, he or she must ultimately go to a room and become an inventor. Only in quiet moments of struggle will both success and joy manifest themselves. – Robert Genn
Learn to Look
When we see keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even supposing that this difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing
Ruskin
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.
– Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw
The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having fresh eyes. – Marcel Proust
Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind without ceasing a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight, and everything that is to be seen, the power of selection will follow.. – John Singer Sargent
I am against style. I think the decay of modern art is because people value style more than truth. Truth is the investigation of visual experience, and through it, of life. That come first, and style is something that follows as an accident. Art historians lead us astray. Their job is of course to weigh up changes in style, but that’s not how it happens and it give the amateur and the student and people who want to become an artist, a very false impression of what it is they’ve got to do. They think they’ve got to find a style, and in doing so, they lose their souls.- Freddie GORE – R.A. & ex. Head of Painting St Martins. (1913 – 2009).
“They came with their gifts of the senses” – Peter Porter, The Painter’s Banquet
The senses overlap and blend together, and cross-pollinate. This experience is called synesthesia. We are not fragmented at the level of our being. We never were. Our senses, blending together, shape our knowing of the world, and our participation in it from moment to moment. That we do not recognize this is merely a measure of our alienation from our own feeling body and from the natural world. – Jon Kabat-Zinn. “Falling Awake.”
He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. – Virgina Woolfe
When we live in forgetfulness for too long, our senses and our perception become dull, and the world around us becomes unclear. We can never be happy living in such a world. Our senses and our perception need a whetstone to sharpen them, so that when we look at a flower, we can truly be in contact with the flower. That whetstone is meditation, mindfulness. – Thich Nhat Hanh.
We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes… Our looking is perfected every day—but we see less and less. Never has it been more urgent to speak of seeing… we are on-lookers, spectators… “subjects” we are, that look at “objects.” Quickly we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once—and for all. By these labels we recognize everything but no longer see anything. – FREDERICK FRANCK, The Zen of Seeing
Perception is where cognition & reality meet … Paying attention is not just analyzing carefully; rather, it is a constructive act… What we build has only the dimensions we have given it. – Ulric Neisser
The overwhelming tendency is to see what we believe to be there, rather than believing in what we actually see. – Arthur Maderson
Observation without evaluation is the highest form of intelligence. – Jiddhu Krishnamurti
We may paint leaves forever, and yet not paint a tree. – Carlson
Beauty
I always teach my students beauty. No one should pass through four years of college without being given the knowledge of beauty and eyes with which to see it. – Chiura Obata
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist. – David Hockney
The world is colourful. It is beautiful, I think. Nature is great. Van Gogh worshipped nature. He might have been miserable, but that doesn’t show in his work. There are always things that will try to pull you down. But we should be joyful in looking at the world. – David Hockney
Making art is founded in the heart, where love unlimited and abundance abide. Each is a heartbeat. – Joseph Raffeal, ‘Talking Beauty’.
Perhaps there is a bit of Midas in all of us (The Greek king who turned everything he touched into gold, but then realised he couldn’t even hug his daughter, and so he begged for his golden touch to be removed). Living in a world that emphasizes instant convertibility (into monetary price) tends to de-emphasize our senses and dull our awareness of them, in favor of the magical numbers that appear and disappear in bank accounts. Instead of appreciating fully the sensuous qualities of a glass of wine, often we are more aware of how much it cost and what that implies about us as sophisticated wine-drinkers…. We end up knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. – David Loy, ‘Money, Sex, War, Karma’
Elle envoya chercher un de ces gâteaux courts et dodus appelés Petites Madeleines qui semblaient avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d’une coquille de Saint-Jacques. … Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause. Il m’avait aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa brièveté illusoire, de la même façon qu’opère l’amour, en me remplissant d’une essence précieuse : ou plutôt cette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était moi. J’avais cessé de me sentir médiocre, contingent, mortel. D’où avait pu me venir cette puissante joie ? Je sentais qu’elle était liée au goût du thé et du gâteau, mais qu’elle le dépassait infiniment, ne devait pas être de même nature. D’où venait-elle ? Que signifiait-elle ? Où l’appréhender ? Je bois une seconde gorgée où je ne trouve rien de plus que dans la première, une troisième qui m’apporte un peu moins que la seconde. Il est temps que je m’arrête, la vertu du breuvage semble diminuer. Il est clair que la vérité que je cherche n’est pas en lui, mais en moi.
Marcel Proust, ‘Du côté de chez Swann’, 1913
Je ne comprenais pas que des gens cherchent dans le guide la date, l’explication de chaque tableau, toutes choses sans relation avec leur propre vie. L’usage que je faisais des œuvres d’art était seulement passionnel. … Dans les musées je ne voyais que les représentations de l’amour. J’étais attirée par les statues d’hommes nus. En elles, je retrouvais la forme des épaules de A., de son ventre, de son sexe, et surtout le léger sillon qui suit la courbe intérieure de la hanche jusqu’au creux de l’aine. – Annie Ernaux, ‘Passion Simple’
There are always flowers for those who want to see them. – Henri Matisse
Be like the flower, turn your faces to the sun. ~ Khalil Gibran
Like wildflowers; You must allow yourself to grow in all the places people thought you never would. – E.V.
Imagination
I found them here at first without hunting,
by grace, as all beauties are first found.
I have hunted and not found them here.
Found, unfound, they breathe their light
into the mind, year after year.
– Wendell Berry
Imagination… “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” – Coleridge
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. ‒ William Blake
The imagination has no patience with repetition. The old clichés of explanation and meaning are unmasked and their …… transparency no longer offers shelter. We become interested in what might be rather than what has always been. Experimentation, adventure and innovation lure us towards new horizons. What we never thought possible now becomes an urgent and exciting pathway. – John O’Donohue, Beauty — The Invisible Embrace
It is possible that the artists are sane and the world they are painting is crazy. ― William Zinsser
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. – Iris Murdoch
" The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
And they said then, 'But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.'
Wallace Stevens - The Man with the Blue Guitar
Mes vers ont le sens qu’on leur prête. – Paul Valéry (My verse have the meaning that one gives to them)
Aspiration
It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are. – David Hockney
The strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement. – Stephen Leacock
The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. – Seth Godin
How? Why?
Never let it be supposed that anyone can be a good painter if he does not clearly understand what he is attempting to do. He draws the bow in vain who has nowhere to point the arrow. – Alberti, Treatise on Painting, 1435
“True works of art are about themselves. Their value relies upon aesthetic of their own emergence and possibilities opened up to an audience.” – Ian Gregory
Painting is the real subject of painting.
Art comes out of art. It begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in this process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own voice.
– Alan Bennett
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. – Kurt Vonnegut
The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about and lots of it! The rest is largely a matter of perseverance – Bayles & Orland, Art & Fear
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. – John Muir (meaning that every element in painting is attached to all the other elements)
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
―
You’re not learning to paint. You are painting to learn. – David Leffel
Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. It is this working with experience that is important in learning. – David Boud
People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things–in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. – Ed Catmull of Pixar (talking about Brainstrust)
Technique & Tools
The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. – Pablo Casals
You don’t know a recipe until you have cooked it & eaten it at least ten times. – Adam Cope
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost. – Matisse
Art is a thing so much of the imagination, of the soul, that it is difficult to descend to the fundamentals of technique and yet make it plain to the student that these are but the ‘means’ and not an end in themselves. – John F. Carlson
Your rules should arise out of your passions and your experience with what works for you. – Richard Schmid
Learn technique; have full command to the extent of not being conscious of how it is done. When craftsmanship has been developed, you are free to create… technique will give way to expression! – Sergei Bongart
If one really wishes to be a master of an art, technical knowledge is not enough. One has to transcend technique so the art becomes an “artless art”, growing out of the Unconsciousness. – D.T. Suzuki
Une béarnaise c’est simplement un jaune d’oeuf, une échalote, un peu d’estragon. Mais il faut des années de pratique avant que le résultat ne soit parfait. – Ferninand Point
Photography, computers & IA
Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you’re less connected to the intensity of life. – George Carlson
The video camera dominates art. It’s a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more. – David Hockney
There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don’t mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops. – David Hockney
We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. ― Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
How many geniuses at the level of Bach and Van Gogh died before the needed technologies were available for their talents to take root? ―Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Improving & Innovating
That’s what I like about a garden. It’s forever evolving. – Tamara Taggatt
One must always be prepared to learn something totally new. – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Don’t try to recreate something you’ve done before. Challenge yourself constantly. – Suzanne Partridge
There is no such thing as starting where Cezanne left off. You have to start where he started… at the beginning. – Kimon Nicolaides
The general fact is that any modification, however important, is accomplished by the addition of corresponding regressions to progress. – Elisée Reclus
What artists do—in addition to changing people—is they give gifts…When an artist realizes they have abundance, that they’re not going to run out of ideas, that they’re not going to run out of smiles. What people who make art realize is that the more they give away, the more they touch people and change people, the better they do. – Seth Godin
Tout homme peut dire véritablement ; mais dire ordonnément, prudemment et suffisamment, peu d’hommes le peuvent. – Michel de Montaigne (For sure any man can say something; but say something in way that is orderly, prudently and sufficently, few can do this).
Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close. – Ed Catmull of Pixar (talking about Brainstrust)
You don’t have to work at Pixar to create a Braintrust. Every creative person can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace. “You can and should make your own solution group,” says Andrew, who has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust, on each of his films. “Here are the qualifications: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most-trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.” – Ed Catmull of Pixar (talking about Brainstrust)
The Learning Curve
No one has your answers because no one but you can comprehend the enormity of your questions. – Patti Digh
When you become aware of the question, then the answer has a chance to appear.
Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do. – Piaget
It doesn’t get any easier; you just go faster – Cycling Wisdom
Learning is most often considered. a process of getting rather than giving. This is most evident in conceptions of student/teacher roles: Teachers give and students get. Yet, in adult learning both giving and getting are critical. – David Kolb
Teachers have a profound effect on their students and I wonder if they are really aware of that. Passing on our knowledge must be done in a way that enables the student to understand it, to retain it, to be able to implement it and to be enthused by it. – Robert Wade.
It’s like trying to teach someone to swim when you’ve never been in the water. You need direct experience with mindfulness to teach it—and your embodied expression of mindfulness transmits a confidence in the path of practice. – Oren Jay Sofer
Advice for Intermediate Level
Once we commit to and engage in a task, we need disciplined perseverance and constancy. The Tibetans call it “enthusiastic perseverance.” When things get hard we may want to run away and find something easier. Fear, anger, frustration, and doubt sabotage our efforts and steal away our resolve to remain in the vessel. Feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, and doubt inevitably arise and are part of the process we are going through. If the task engages us and really means something to us, at some point such feelings are bound to be released. Then the process of refinement and mastery can really begin. – Rob Preece
Training for a marathon is much like climbing a ladder. Each ring is a short-term goal that must be met in sequence in order to reach the long-term goal at the top of the ladder. – Richard Benyo
“Ikigai is not about achieving perfection, but about striving for continuous improvement. It is about making small, incremental progress each day.” -Ken Mogi on Ikigai.
Break the routine! It is very much like working out in the gym: if you stick to the same set of physical exercises without changing your workout programme for a long time, the progress stops.
Advice for Advanced Level
Every artist, craftsman and craftswoman, musician, writer, and athlete knows the significance of gradual mastery and how it feels when the creative energy begins to flow more freely; likewise every healer, therapist, teacher, and gardener. Transformation takes place slowly within the vessel, and we gradually master our own creative vitality as it is expressed in the task. We also discover love and joy when we genuinely devote ourselves to the process. -Rob Preece
La soupe au pistou est une soupe de légumes qui ne doit surtout pas avoir le go^y d’une soupe de légumes. – Gui Gedda
A master chef makes you taste the tomato – as a tomato! – Eric Berthelot, our beloved master chef for our workshops during many happy years & many delicious meals.
Practice, Practice, Pratice (and Some Play)
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up & get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part & a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. ~ Chuck Close
The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too… – Merce Cunningham
If it’s a hobby, it’s for you. If it’s work, it’s for others. – Seth Godin
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing that makes you good. – Malcolm Gladwell
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. – Barthelme
It may be when we no longer know what to do,
– Wendell Berry
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
To understand theory is not enough. Much practice is necessary… – Kimon Nicolaides
