Thomas Eakins Quotes

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

Make everything as simple as possible but not simpler.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.

In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

People tend to simplify things.

I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.

I like cutting through complexity and trying to get to the kernel of an idea.

There's a standard of songwriting that, when you start immersing yourself in those types of songs, it raises your own bar as a songwriter. There's also simplicity in the songwriting. It's much harder to be simple than it is to be complicated.

Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.

I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.

Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

I've noticed that sometimes when you keep things a little smaller, it's easier to focus on the creative aspects of what you're doing.

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.

Making something simple is very difficult.