Coco Chanel Quotes

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

The belly carries the legs, and not the legs the belly.

The legs and arms can be a revelation of the back, the spine's extensions.

O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.

The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.

Some stories wait their turn to be told, others just tap you on the shoulder and insist you tell them.

Art will liberate itself from the needs and desires of men. No longer will we paint a forest ora horseas we like oras theyappear to us, but as they really are.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.

a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.

If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.

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 would advise him who wishes to imitate well, to look closely into life and manners, and thereby to learn to express them with truth.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

Why you got your ass on your shoulders?

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.

I would always be painting and drawing. If I was stuck at home, I was in the basement working on a painting.