John Updike Quotes

I'm interested in aesthetics, in the way things look, in finding something in an image that maybe people haven't seen.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

What is art but a way of seeing?

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

There are forms of art that I might not like to do myself, but I still have respect for the artists who create it.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

I paint. I love the visual arts.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.