Joshua Reynolds Quotes

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.

When I was little, I just was very tuned in to the functionality and aesthetics of things around me.

I know colors like some people know a melody. And the tunes of my favorite musicians energizes me when I work.

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.

Art is subjective. I'm not looking for people's praise.

I don't really like reading: I like seeing and touching images.

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.

When I talk with people, I don't even see what they are wearing . . . No, I recognize it if it's something particularly nice and interesting. I see the exception.

Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.

Just as the unmusical ear is not competent to judge music, so it is likewise with pictures, whether they are paintings, drawings or photos. Only a sensitive and trained eye gives us the right to judge.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.