Thomas Eakins Quotes

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.

I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone.

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

I do a lot of work on computers, but I am so practiced in drawing that I can draw it full size, and you can take the measurements off my drawings. It's like drafting, but it's a work of art - a really beautiful drawing.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

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.

A great painter can paint something really complex, but they can crystallize it into something really simple.

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

I'm into using acrylic, in a complicated kind of way: Making it just as good as oil paint - better, maybe. It's odd - when I started out, acrylic was for children, pretty much. It was a cheaper paint. It wasn't supposed to look very good or last very long.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

And the part about being a professional artist is that you can tell, and you can do it over again, even if you can't say how you got there exactly.

It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.

Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.

In the hands of a master, light and shade is one of the great qualities of art.