Jerry Saltz Quotes

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don't think he painted a masterpiece.

A nice blend of prediction and surprise seem to be at the heart of the best art.

In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.

Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

And what I love about music and art in general is that you can take something so negative or positive - any emotion, no matter how sad or happy - and turn it into art.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

Know that the secret of the arts is to correct nature.

As regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect that in these volumes I shall undoubtedly show myself of very considerable importance not only to builders but also to all scholars.

Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness- the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!

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

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

Creative vision creates art" - he motioned around the gallery - "that shows the rest of the world a new angle. That's beautiful thing." "Or some sort of madness", she said.

My definition of an artist is anyone who's ahead of his time and behind on his rent.

I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other... complement each other as a man and a woman do.