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James Elkins Quotes

Art critic

James Elkins is a renowned art critic born in 1955. His work spans a wide range of fields from modern art to contemporary art, known for his profound analysis and unique insights.

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All Paint Painting Painter Art Artist Oil Color Ifs Looks Made Brushes Dark Giving Materials Mood Seeing Seems Sun Answers Body

Famous James Elkins Quotes

“To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.”

Ideas Artist Memories Paint Oil Breathing Pushing Brushes Mixing Dripping Blurry

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter.”

Said Matter Faces Certain Memories Painting Materials Faults Paint Speed Resistance Interpretation Capture Gestures Brushes Mindless Insistence

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.”

Way Want Trying Years Materials Paint Painter Behave

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.”

Doe Stories Painting Paint Oil Decades Obsession Painter Incomplete Thickness

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime.”

Years Beautiful Morning Blood Lifetime Paint Studios Oil Painter Substance Worthwhile Every Morning Infuriating

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.”

Discovery Transformation Paint Oil Brilliant Mood Painter Unexpected Muddy

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.”

Giving Art Hands Faces Tree Movement Color Painting Fine Shadow Paint Lovely Painter Texture Fine Arts Fixing Reacting Unnoticed Lovely Things Antenna

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.”

Artist Speak Color Painting Mass Paint Mood Dialogue Unspoken

Author:James Elkins

“Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.”

Made Body Records Fronts Movement Painting Paint Casts Painter Sat Delicate Gestures Canvas Portraits Tense

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.”

Play Body Numbers Paint Leaving Rational Abstract Compelling Counting Fertile Hallucinations

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.”

Thinking Kind Art Important Hard Problem Happens Language Answers Painting Paint Historian Art History Important Questions

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

About the Author

Born: 1955
Known for: Art critic
Quotes: 35

Books & Sources

What Painting IsRelated source material

Pictures and TearsRelated source material

How to Use Your EyesRelated source material

Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of PaintingsRelated source material

The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing – How Sight Alters the Seen and Transforms the SeerRelated source material

What Photography IsRelated source material

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