Artistic Realism Quotes

To this day, I have people I might meet who will make assumptions about my life based on fictional elements of 'The Squid And The Whale.' But I think that's par for the course if you make something that feels kind of real.

I was a Fine Art major. You do a bit of everything until the final year, when you specialise. I did pencil drawing and sculpture. It's a pretty well-rounded fine art education. I thought that it was viable option to make a living out of art. I'm not sure if I was thinking realistically; maybe I never was. But it had great appeal.

The fact is that pictures which are unlike reality ought not be approved, and even if they are technically fine, this is no reason why they should offhand be judged to be correct, if their subject is lacking in the principles of reality carried out with no violations.

Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

Beauty has became a pejorative word in art. It was not something one should aspire to, because it was pedestrian. Beautiful things became cheap and easy. If it's cheap and easy, then upper classes aren't going to aspire to it. So, they have to find something more esoteric. I wanted the paintings to be realistic enough that you would have the ability to forget that I'm showing them to you.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

Glory to that Homer of painting, to that father of warmth and enthusiasm... he really paints men.

I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group - surrealists - use my name. No, no, I am realist.

The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.

Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.

I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.

Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden.

A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can't be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won't really be pure.

I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Everything in art is but a copy of nature.

My art flatters nobody by imitation; it courts nobody by smoothness, tickles nobody by petiteness... there is no finish in nature.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.