John Ruskin Quotes

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.

The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

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.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.