Artistic Description Quotes

When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.

Vermilion alone could render the brilliant red of the tiles on the opposite slope. The orange of the soil, the harsh crude colors of the walls and greenery, the ultramarine and cobalt of the sky achieved an extreme harmony that was sensually and musically ordered.

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.

Music. Close your eyes and it's a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.

I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.

It's very hard to say I'm surrealist. It's like saying I'm poetic. It's not something you want necessarily to be aware of.

The shield of Achilles was a great work of art; Homer devoted an entire chant of the Iliad to describing it. I suppose that the Americans would cast and mould such a shield in a few hours

Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically.

I didn't know the term 'synesthesia' until I was working on 'Cruel Summer.' Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli.

There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

A verbose, prosaic review which mentions whistling winds and the timeless feeling of jade doesn't mean anything to me; I don't need a novella telling me about how an album is like a fine meal.

There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp.