Mason Cooley Quotes

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real.

I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

I think, for an artist, when you're drawing somebody who actually exists, it's a much steeper critical curve, as there is an actual representation of that person out there. You can't just interpret it any way you want.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

He [William Merritt Chase] is, I suspect, getting a very truthful likeness. I would like it better if [it] was not so gray, so cramped about the eyes, and not quite so corpulent. But is this not quarreling with nature?

While it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not be approved, and even if they are technically fine, this is no reason why they should offhand be judged to be correct, if their subject is lacking in the principles of reality carried out with no violations.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

As in the case of painters, who have undertaken to give us a beautiful and graceful figure, which may have some slight blemishes, we do not wish then to pass over such blemishes altogether, nor yet to mark them too prominently. The one would spoil the beauty, and the other destroy the likeness of the picture.

This sort of adoration of the real is but a heightening of the beau ideal.

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.