Jim Dine Quotes

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

I know I draw without taking my pen off the page. I just keep going, and that my drawings I think of them as scribbles. I don't think they mean anything to anybody except to me, and then at the end of the day, the end of the project, they wheel out these little drawings and they're damn close to what the finished building is and it's the drawing.

Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.

Drawing is the root of everything.

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

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.

Drawing is your understanding of form.

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

I'm really interested in making a mark on a paper and letting that be cursive shorthand for an idea - that's the origin of cartooning.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.