Quotes on Learning to Paint
I am still learning. – Michelangelo
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence. – Abigail Adams
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
Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else. – Sydney Clemens
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. – Picasso
The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons. – David Hockney
The only way to learn to paint is by painting – Charles Hawthorne
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.
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
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
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
Even carelessness can be read as confidence. It’s better to make a mistake and leave it, than paint something very labored. – Joseph Zbukvic
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
Aspiration
Mon enfance a été très misérable. Mon père est parti et ma mère était avec quatre enfants, qu’elle devait faire vivre par elle-même. C’était une enfance très dure. Mais moi, toujours, j’ai voulu être peintre. On m’a donné des crayons de couleurs à 7 ans, et je faisais un dessin avec un moulin, et on trouvait ça si beau… je n’ai jamais quitté l’idée d’être peintre. – Bram Van Velde
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 path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. – Seth Godin
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
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. Be continually making mental notes, make them again and again, test what you remember by sketches until you have got them fixed. Do not be backward at using every device and making every experiment that ingenuity can devise, in order to attain that sense of completeness which nature so beautifully provides, always bearing in mind the limitations of the materials in which you work. – John Singer Sargent
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 overwhelming tendency is to see what we believe to be there, rather than believing in what we actually see. – Arthur Maderson
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 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
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
The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having fresh eyes. – Marcel Proust
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
Observation without evaluation is the highest form of intelligence. – Jiddhu Krishnamurti
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don’t mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops. – David Hockney
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
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
We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. ― Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
The Learning Curve
No one has your answers because no one but you can comprehend the enormity of your questions. – Patti Digh
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 experience. Everything else is just information. ― Albert Einstein
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
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
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)
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