Ryan North Quotes

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.

A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Like many musicians, it's my roots in music, playing cover songs. I've done probably a lot more covers than the average person who does what I do, but I'm very proud of it, and I do feel like I really bring a lot artistically to these covers.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!

And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.

Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.

My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.

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.

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design.

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.