John Singer Sargent Quotes

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

The sculptor must paint with his chisel; half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.

I always start a painting with the sky.

The artistic process in digital art is very much the same as for making other kinds of paintings.

The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.

All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.

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.

In every picture there should be shade as well as light.

Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark.

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

As paradoxical as it may seem a great sculptor is as much a colourist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one, as much as the most charming etchings.

Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.

The paint for the grey paintings was mixed beforehand and then applied with different implements - sometimes a roller, sometimes a brush. It was only after painting them that I sometimes felt that the grey was not yet satisfactory and that another layer of paint was needed.

Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

Give up the idea of 'color' for awhile! Consider masses - values, only... One dark and one light place in every picture.

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.

Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favourite thing - pencil is more my medium than wet paint.

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of painting.

Paint your picture by means of the lights. Lights define texture and color - shadows define form.

There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.

The whole basis of working in black and white and grays became the basis of my understanding of color, because it's all about tone, it's all about light and dark. If you don't get that, then your color work is going to be a mess. So that's the beginning of the toolkit: drawing and black and white media.