James Ivory Quotes

I love art, painting, and drawing and studying art, like Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

I'm into using acrylic, in a complicated kind of way: Making it just as good as oil paint - better, maybe. It's odd - when I started out, acrylic was for children, pretty much. It was a cheaper paint. It wasn't supposed to look very good or last very long.

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

I learned a lot of painting tricks painting outside.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I really like the language of painting.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles - like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

I'm drawn to silhouettes because of their emblematic rather than their illustrational quality. I see them as shapes, allowing an image to become an abstraction and for pure painting to take place.

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

I have many favorite artists... Van Gogh as one, but he didn't really sing a lot!

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

I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.

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.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

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

I had had no art training.

I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

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

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