Ralph Allen Quotes

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

When I was very, very young, seven years old, I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion, to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me, I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

I want to know art.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

I grew up going to museums. I was privileged to discover art and artists in a very personal way.

Until I was eighteen, I did not know that you could study fashion design or art. I really didn't know. I already had my nose in the art world; I was already looking at things, but I didn't really get it that you could study that because my school was a very different environment.

Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.

I'm extremely interested in art, every form of art, but I'm interested in it when it's good and interested in it when it's interesting.

Growing up in the '70s and '80s when my dad had an art gallery, one of the things that frustrated me was the world seemed so tiny, and to appreciate contemporary art, you needed a history of art, a formal education. I was more interested in the people, and that's why I went into the movie business in the first place.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I love painting. I went to college in fine arts, and I still do it all the time.

Art is a critical component in a well-rounded education. Art is the level playing field - no matter how rich or poor, tall or short, pretty or ugly to the bone, if you can draw, you can find personal fulfillment and build self-confidence. Art is the highest achievement of mankind.

My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.

My exposure to visual art all my life was intensive.