John Singer Sargent Quotes

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.

Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

I paint the American scene.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

As an artist, you're just observing the world around you. So much is overwhelming and it's all so inescapable that it can't all speak to general cultural statements.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

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 first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.