John Hench Quotes

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

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

I've always been a creative person, and I'd always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.

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

Fine art is really something I want to get into.

I don't think money can help you become a better painter, for sure. You can have all the studios you want; it won't help you make a better painting.

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.

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.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

I learned how to draw from being bored in school. I would doodle on the margins of my paper.

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.

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.

The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you'd have a nude taking a crazy position, and you'd have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you'd do a one-minute drawing.

I'm enamored with the art world.

I want to know art.

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

I paint landscapes, figuratives. I painted all my life. In fact, I started as a commercial artist.

Art matters.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.