Nature Representation Quotes

See nature in terms of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.

The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.

A Boston man is the east wind made flesh.

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.

Many painters had a clear idea of what fractals are. Take a French classic painter named Poussin. Now, he painted beautiful landscapes, completely artificial ones, imaginary landscapes. And how did he choose them? Well, he had the balance of trees, of lawns, of houses in the distance. He had a balance of small objects, big objects, big trees in front and his balance of objects at every scale is what gives to Poussin a special feeling.

Completely true to nature!' - what a lie: / How could nature ever be constrained into a picture? / The smallest bit of nature is infinite! / And so he paints what he likes about it. / And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!

My job has always been to hold a mirror up to nature.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

Nature/Structure. There is no more to say. In my pictures I reduce to that. But 'reduce' is the wrong word, because these are not simplifications. I can't verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

The soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body... for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.