John Sterling Quotes

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

Color is an intense experience on its own.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Color cannot stand alone.

The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

I don't understand beauty.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.

I love pretty things; and I hate to look in the glass and see something that isn't pretty. It makes me feel so sorrowful—just as I feel when I look at any ugly thing. I pity it because it isn't beautiful.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

What counted was not the facts but the fears.