John Ruskin Quotes

I have likewise made many 'skies' and effects - for I wish it could be said of me as Fuselli says of Rembrandt, 'he followed nature in her calmest abodes and could pluck a flower on every hedge - yet he was born to cast a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature'... We have had noble clouds & effects of light & dark & color.

I like all those painters who loved and had a strong feeling for nature.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

I had the landscape in my arms as I painted it. I had the landscape in my mind and shoulder and wrist.

Music, art, landscape - these are all things I draw inspiration from.

To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.

One paints with one's head, not one's hand.

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

I always see these landscapes in my dreams, and feel happy. I desperately try to transform these dreams into artwork, so that even while napping, I construct and reconstruct various images.

My inspiration came from the land, ... and, of course, from Paul Klee . . . and the poetics of his paintings.

You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.

I haven't yet managed to capture the colour of this landscape; there are moments when I'm appalled at the colours I'm having to use, I'm afraid what I'm doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.

If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands.

And when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains,-alas! too few.

Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore.

(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.

A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.