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Quote by James Elkins

“Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.”

Quote by James Elkins

Book:What Painting Is

Work

What Painting Is

This book delves into the fundamental aspects of painting, examining its techniques, history, and aesthetic principles. more

Author

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. more

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“A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of coloured slurries on the palette.”

Knows Looks Oil Painter Brushes Mixtures Methodology Palette

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“Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.”

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“It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.”

Ifs Art Modernism Irrelevance

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“Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.”

Giving Looks Has Beens Made Seems Moving Modern Century Painting Comparison License Modernism

Author:James Elkins

“At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colours of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright I could not remember having seen it on any object.”

Ifs Remember Music Fire Objects Red Gold Filled Painter Colour Concerts Rainbow Orchestra Violin

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“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

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“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.”

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“The opposite of a glance... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second.”

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Author:James Elkins

“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.”

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Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is