Gustave Flaubert Quotes

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

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

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

There is no reason for me to show my collection in New York, because it's not about craft and technique there.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

My paintings are rubbish.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

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

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

I think a craft becomes an art form when the space of possible solutions becomes so huge that engineering can't carry you through.