William Morris Hunt Quotes

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.

Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I wil become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

Drawing is your understanding of form.

It was just the two of us, inside there with just mirrors, all the way around us. Everywhere we looked, there were these two freaks, sitting at a table, eyeballing each other.

I can only draw what I see.

Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.

The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother: I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.

Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.

I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

I am going to do some drawings or paintings...in the mirror of my wardrobe..with myself as a figure doing something.

Although its light is wide and great, the Moon is reflected in a puddle one inch wide. The whole Moon and the entire sky is reflected in one dew drop on the grass.