Michael Foreman Quotes

The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.

I like form and shape and strength in pictures.

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

I'm not a very good painter, but I'm learning a lot.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

I've been taking art classes for a couple of years; I love to draw.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

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.

Behrens had a great sense of the great form. that was his main interest; and that I certainly understood and learned from him.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.

Perspective was always important. There are some cartoonists who can stand at the foot of a building looking straight up and they'll capture it perfectly. And then there are those of us who do the same drawing and it's the goofiest-looking thing in the world. But after a while I guess you just learn what you're capable of and what you can and can't do.

To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.

I really like the language of painting.