You can't smear acrylics, you know, it dries too fast.
Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form and outline, on where that is put.
Art without technique is invertebrate, shapeless, characterless.
Technique does not constitute art. Nor is it a vague, fuzzy romantic quality known as ‘beauty,’ remote from the realities of everyday life. It is the depth and intensity of an artist’s experience that are the first importance in art.
How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.
The first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it.
When you paint, try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway.
Drawing is your understanding of form.
The technician should never forget that he is an artist, the artist never that he is a technician
I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that 'a light' can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction, that 'a blue' in different parts will play all sorts of different roles.
In the work of Seurat, you can see the dots of neutral colors carrying the form and then the dots of more intense color that make the color texture. It is a totally different principle that than of the Impressionists who used broken color to imitate visual effect.
I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.
Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.
If you've never mixed paint, you aren't going to be able to paint properly.
But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.
There is the potential for much more spontaneity with prints than there is with the sculpture, which tends to be very slow, accretive kind of process-labor intensive.
The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.
Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.
I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill.
Painting on the ground was a cool challenge because you can't just stand back and see what you're doing.
I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.
And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done
In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.
It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.
