Maxfield Parrish Quotes

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

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

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.

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

I paint abstract expressions.

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

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.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

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

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

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