John Singer Sargent Quotes

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Color is a matter of taste and of sensitivity.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.