John Sexton Quotes

In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual.

I was brought up in industrial south Lancashire, down the cobbled road from where LS Lowry (1887-1976) lived and painted.

My studio was on 9th Street between University and Broadway.

I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

The environment of San Francisco has so much history to it that I really appreciate. Musically, socially, and culturally. There's this new culture of people; it's a crazy place to be.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.

If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

When I watch films now, theres more of a musicality to the way the film are written.

I went back and studied the game, was a student of the game and worked on my craft and dedicated myself, you know? A lot of my music revolves around me growing up in Compton. I want to tell a different story that's never been told before, of a good kid in a mad city.

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.

Unfortunately Seattle is my muse, for the better or worse of Seattle - I'm not sure.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

The art of making art, is putting it together.

In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.