John Constable Quotes

If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.

I create for artistic intent only and do everything from life.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

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.

Every time I copy something, I can draw it for the rest of my life. But research is so painful - I mean just opening up a magazine looking for a picture of a car or looking out the window looking for a car is just hard!

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

I think, for an artist, when you're drawing somebody who actually exists, it's a much steeper critical curve, as there is an actual representation of that person out there. You can't just interpret it any way you want.

When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

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

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.

I can only draw what I see.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence.

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.

Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge

How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.

This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. [A big drawing of a rectangle] Only technical details are missing.