Phil Elverum Quotes

When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.

When you go to the Sistine Chapel with Sophia Loren, it can be quite some time before your thoughts turn to the ceiling.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

I am a big fan of the Impressionists, and in my school days, I was inspired by Caravaggio, Velazquez and Rembrandt.

You go to Florence and all the paintings you've seen in books are there. To see them in real life, it just blows your mind.

Arcadia' was started and finished at the Medici villa in Rome.

I'm not mannerist. I don't think I'm interested in mannerism. If I ever use it in a way, or if manner is like some kind of product of certain sorts of usage of different kinds of materials, then it's about involution or turning in on that.

My exposure to visual art all my life was intensive.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

Jackie's dream was France, but mine was really art and Italy, as that was all I cared about through school. My history of art teacher, who saved my life at Farmington, was obsessed with Bernard Berenson, and I succumbed as well.

I am always connected with the Renaissance a lot; that's why I am connected with Pitti Palace.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

In Rome, I loved seeing the Caravaggios. There are churches in Rome that have Caravaggios, and there's one, not far from Piazza Navona, that has the best, I think: St. Matthew with the money.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

My education in the arts began at the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a Cleveland child, I visited the museum's halls and corridors, gallery spaces and shows, over and over. For me, the Cleveland Museum was a school of my very own - the place where my eyes opened, my tastes developed, my ideas about beauty and creativity grew.