Peter Cook Quotes

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

Black and white creates a strange dreamscape that color never can.

I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities.

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.

The perfection of an art consists in the employment of a comprehensive system of laws, commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but concealed from the eye of the spectator; and in the production of effects that seem to flow forth spontaneously, as though uncontrolled by their influence, and which are equally excellent, whether regarded individually, or in reference to the proposed result.

I don't think Seurat would have been aware of the dots - he would have been aware of what he was trying to do. The dots were an instrument.

Painting is manual labor, no different from any other; it can be done well or poorly.

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

When you are painting you should take a flat mirror and often look at your work within it, and it will then be seen in reverse, and will appear to be by the hand of some other master, and you will be better able to judge of its faults than in any other way.

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.

In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.

The sculptor must paint with his chisel; half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.

This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. [A big drawing of a rectangle] Only technical details are missing.

I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.

Little more black, little more blue. And we'll just put that in using little crisscross strokes or - or little X's, whatever you want to call them. Whatever.

The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.

You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique.

Make yourself a master of perspective, then acquire perfect knowledge of the proportions of men and other animals.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

I realized why movie scores are mostly strings, because it really frees your eyes to look around.

What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.