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It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable. (M. H. Abrams)
-on Robert Frost...
He always violated your expectations... He was a character. (M. H. Abrams)
-on his student Harold Bloom...
Indisputably a genius and one of the great flamboyant characters of our era. (M. H. Abrams)
The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. (Christopher Alexander)
Before I could engage my creativity, I had to learn enough of the classical theory clearly evident in the great works of art of my heroes. (Greg Allen)
Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause. (Washington Allston)
-Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children...
Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs. (Sherwood Anderson)
-on Georges Braque...
His role was heroic. His art serene and splendid. He expresses a beauty full of tenderness, and the pearly sheens of his paintings play on our senses like a rainbow. (Guillaume Apollinaire)
I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.' (Isaac Asimov)
I began to practise day and night, and the more I did, the more I was overwhelmed by the tremendous achievement of that great family of black American musicians I was beginning to know closely. (Gilad Atzmon)
- British Artist 1921-1975...
Michelangelo's contemporaries thought him the greatest artist who ever lived and called him 'divine.' His reputation as sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman has not subsequently been surpassed, and who is to say his contemporaries were wrong? (Michael Ayrton)
When we think of Leonardo da Vinci, the last thing that comes to mind is the nationality of the artist. The great masters belong to the world. (Igor Babailov)
Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint. (Francis Bacon)
Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator. (Francis Bacon)
Sometimes Cezanne painted things the way they look when you are looking at
something else. (Darby Bannard)
To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly. (Darby Bannard)
-on Vincent van Gogh...
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination; when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (John Berger)
Getting it right is just as hard as in Sargent's days. (Lida van Bers)
If there were a master of stupidity in this world, I would really love to listen to his success story. (Toba Beta)
-MoviesOnline...
When caricaturist, Al Hirschfeld, did a drawing of a celebrity, it often looked more like the person than the person did. That's our goal in animation. (Brad Bird)
The accomplishments of master artists are stupendous, the result of fearsome diligence, vision, hard-earned skill, profound understanding of their discipline, and an extra dash of something we might call genius. (Eric Booth)
I refused [to study under Rodin] because nothing grows under large trees. (Constantin Brancusi)
There is always, in the fine arts, a physical interface between the artist's esthetic vision and the material result he seeks. The interface may be the application of brush to canvas, chisel to marble, bow to string... It may be the control of voice in song or the control of body in dance. It is the mastery of the interface that comprises the artistry; it is what constitutes the 'art' in fine art. (Robert Brault)
Spend your days wisely with the best thoughts and works of those who have walked the road before you. Search their paths, their timeless inspirations, and the lineage of their genius. Learn your craft well and your talent will mature into its full possibility. (Charles Philip Brooks)
And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts. (James Broughton)
My real ancestors are artists of the past. I am comforted and excited and soothed and inspired by them. (Clint Brown)
This art of conservation is strength, and makes the masterpiece a masterpiece. Otherwise, the man who simply brought all the different colors obtainable, and squeezed them out upon the canvas to give it 'full force,' would be the greatest master, instead of being merely extravagant. (John F. Carlson)
Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me (raw young pupil that I was) that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows. (Emily Carr)
Whatever we have done, Kertesz did first. (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry? As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life! (Pablo Casals)
The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life. (Mary Cassatt)
If you set out to copy after one master today and after one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably become fantastic, because each style will fatigue your mind... (Cennino Cennini)
We may all descend from Pissarro. (Paul Cezanne)
Cezanne was an innovator, a rule breaker, without whom the Impressionists could never have happened. (Jane Champagne)
When you are young, you study the masters for their techniques and style. But when you are older, you study them for their emotion, feeling. (Chiang Chao-Shen)
As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them... It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still. (David Cobley)
-on J.M.W. Turner...
...Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy. (John Constable)
-Eugene Boudin, 1937...
My God, you are a seraph, Boudin! You are the only one of us who really knows the sky! (Gustave Courbet)
It is not about surpassing the masters who preceded us but more about opening new artistic vistas. It is about doing the things they didn't have a chance or the time to do. (Liu Dan)
An hour or two of learning from the masters is usually enough to recharge my artistic batteries. (James Dean)
The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe. (Edgar Degas)
I deeply love the natural world, but I'm never so inspired to paint by looking at a live peony as I am by looking at a painting by Fantin Latour, or one by Cezanne, or William Merritt Chase, or John Stuart Ingle, or... the list is endless. (Robert C. DeVoe)
As a Canadian living in the west, I feel very strongly connected to the spirit of the mountains that has been captured by Lawren Harris. The energy in his paintings continues to live on. While viewing some of them... I was flooded by such a strong surge of spirituality that it moved me to tears. (Lorna Dockstader)
The more wise and powerful a master, the more directly is his work created, and the simpler it is. (Meister Johann Eckhart)
To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity. (Thomas Edison)
Pablo Casals is a very great artist. What I admire is the firm stand he has taken not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. (Albert Einstein)
In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo. (T. S. Eliot)
The artist always has the masters in his eye. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
No artist produces only masterpieces. When we think of Cezanne or Picasso, chances are we are thinking of only a few pieces culled from a vast body of work. (Michael Epp)
You cannot become a master until you actually take the leap, do the work, make several thousand mistakes, and live to tell about it. (Suzanne Falter-Barns)
I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice. (Erich Fromm)
Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody! (Paul Gauguin)
In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters. (Paul Gauguin)
Learn from the greats, and expose yourself to better work. (Sara Genn)
When one does something, one must go back to the ancients. (Charles Gleyre)
- unsourced...
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has, at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things. (Vincent van Gogh)
Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour. (Vincent van Gogh)
I have had three masters, Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. (Francisco de Goya)
I was created by the all powerful God to fill the universe with my masterpieces. (El Greco)
A 'Master' may not realize when the time has come. It creeps up on an artist that is simply doing what he feels needs to be done. (Brad Greek)
For all his artistic skills, what's most important about Rembrandt is his deep compassion. (Irwin Greenberg)
If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept. (Franz Grillparzer)
The things I felt... about certain painters of the past that... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface... That's truly... the act of creation. (Philip Guston)
Van Gogh failed as a minister, failed as an art dealer, failed as an art student, failed in love, and failed to sell paintings, but he has never failed to inspire us! (Andrew Hamilton)
The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette. (Henry S. Haskins)
Masters are mostly tortured individuals who create beauty out of the disasters of painful childhoods, or physical limitations. Those are things that are beyond anyone's wants or understanding. Being a master is a solitary path few are willing or able to walk. (B. J. Haugstad)
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. (Ernest Hemingway)
It's a wrong idea that a master is a finished person. Masters are very faulty; they haven't learned everything and they know it. (Robert Henri)
The real master of art expresses feeling rather than technique, which is achieved through intuition rather than education. (Quang Ho)
No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first. (David Hockney)
What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. I like the way in which they develop space and shape in architectural continuity - the rhythm across their paintings. (Ian Hornak)
-on Fred Varley...
The way he used colours to express feeling and his grasp of the model's character was amazing. (E. J. Hughes)
-to Max Stern...
It would be nice once during my life to go over [to Europe] and study the original paintings of the Masters. (E. J. Hughes)
You can't do a fine thing without having seen fine examples. (William Morris Hunt)
-on William Hogarth...
Hogarth ranks among those pictorial creators who have discovered the expressive force of the brushstroke as well as of color and its harmonies. He makes his entry into art as a reflection of Hals and Velasquez. (Rene Huyghe)
Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters. (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. (Steve Jobs)
He that teaches us anything which we knew not before is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master. (Samuel Johnson)
We'd already seen three Caravaggios that day - why did I need another? I just did. Great art is deeply compelling. (Jonathan Jones)
In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form. (Wassily Kandinsky)
Painting seems an old man's business. After a certain time you're out of it, and you just paint masterpieces. (Alex Katz)
Accomplished artists are those who have proved themselves to be the best at what they do. 'Master' is the title often given to such a person, and rightly so: They've established themselves as worthy of the title through many years of study, and devotion of their lives to their craft. (Daniel J. Keys)
We are not makers of history. We are made by history. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
-when Egon Schiele, at age 17, asks if he might take him as a student...
Perhaps you can teach me something. (Gustav Klimt)
Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot. (Barbara Kruger)
In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. (Yayoi Kusama)
There are two tracks that artists go down: the technical and the conceptual. Many artists are good at one or the other; a Master is an expert in both. (Mark Larson)
Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed. (Max Liebermann)
-on George Carpenter...
It's a culmination of a truly gifted mind that has been worked hard by the artist who owns it through the many decades of being productive. (David Lussier)
Trancelike, the master creates to the exclusion of applause or critique and becomes an open vessel to the creative fervor of the universe. (C. D. MacKenzie)
-on J. M. W. Turner...
Magic lies at the end of the road of mastery, but somehow Turner traveled that road with magic in his pocket. (Mary Madsen)
What I am looking for is a masterpiece. I don't want to waste my time. I am tired of experiments. (Natalia Makarova)
I recommend that you should work actively... and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch. (Kasimir Malevich)
-on Velazquez...
He is the painter of painters. (Edouard Manet)
I've often thought 'Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape - absolutely beautiful.' But that is not me and, of course, it is not what one does nowadays... (Queen Margrethe II)
Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting. (Henri Matisse)
Your Master Teacher knows all you need to learn, the perfect timing for your learning it, and the ideal way of teaching it to you. You don't create a Master Teacher - that's already been done. You discover your Master Teacher. (Peter McWilliams)
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. (H. L. Mencken)
I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm. (Henry Miller)
The thing is to become a master, and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. (Henry Miller)
I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way... (Claude Monet)
I've said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him. I came to be fascinated by his studies, the products of what I call instantaneity. (Claude Monet)
-spoken in Prague, 1787...
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied. (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Monet taught us to see Spirit in Nature. (Anne Nelson-Sweat)
One can be a technical master – full of craftsmanship, but not in most senses an artistic master. (oliver)
- monograph Tapies, 1978...
Antoni Tapies: a painter who was to create mysteries in matter itself. (Roland Penrose)
Haydon tried to force the heroic style upon unwilling patrons, and paid the penalty in poverty and neglect. The great majority of master-painters gave the public what it wanted, and were blessed in return with creature comfort. (Walter J. Phillips)
-on John Constable...
Sir George Beaumont... was a link with a remoter past, old enough to assume a didactic attitude towards Constable, whom he befriended. On one occasion he asked, 'Do you not find it difficult to determine where to place your brown tree?' 'Not in the least,' said Constable, 'for I never put such a thing into a picture.' (Walter J. Phillips)
-to Matisse...
I've mastered drawing and am looking for color; you've mastered color and are looking for drawing. (Pablo Picasso)
It's only the masters that matter. Those who create. And they don't even turn around when you piss on their heels... (Pablo Picasso)
Picasso was always re-inventing himself, he was always exploring, and my thinking is that he was right to do so. We can't all be him, but I too need to express myself in more than one way... (Henryk Ptasiewicz)
I take back all I ever said about the Old Masters. They give great lessons. (Howard Pyle)
The one common element that I have discovered when studying master painters is that they were all students. (Stephen Quiller)
He who chooses to be a master never does 'just enough' to get by - nor does he cut corners or attempt to cheat the system. He who chooses mastery lives his life asking, 'How can I do more, give more, be more, and thereby accelerate the achievement of my ultimate destiny?' (James Arthur Ray)
A purely abstract painting has music but little or no poetry. A painting that is merely illustrative has poetry but not music... Great masterpieces integrate both music and poetry. (Barry John Raybould)
Choose only one master – Nature. (Rembrandt)
In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
Raphael and Titian seem to have looked at Nature for different purposes; they both had the power of extending their view to the whole; but one looked only for the general effect as produced by form, the other as produced by colour. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted... (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
One night in the early sixties I passed something on the Long Island Expressway just before the Queens tunnel that I must have seen for years. The billboard advertising cigars, Dutch Masters. I realized it was sort of perfect. It's weird isn't it? You're looking at Rembrandt – in neon! It was too much, it was irresistible. (Larry Rivers)
Van Gogh is the best example of how a person can be on the right track, propelled by gut feeling and some kind of strange obsessive stubborn conviction, that no one seems to understand. (Jim Rowe)
When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece. (John Ruskin)
-on the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto...
It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling. (John Ruskin)
Matisse is a beast. (Jerry Saltz)
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years. (Carl Sandburg)
A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages – stand quietly before them and wait until they speak to us. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man. (Albert Schweitzer)
I always tell the younger filmmakers and students: Do it like the painters used to... Study the old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn. (Martin Scorsese)
-Amadeus: A Play...
I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends - and I from Legends created only the ordinary! (Peter Shaffer)
Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world. (Nina Simone)
To mention only contemporaries, Delacroix, Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Courbet are masters. And finally [I like] all those [painters] who loved and had a strong feeling for nature. (Alfred Sisley)
Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work. (John Sloan)
In the hands of a master, light and shade is one of the great qualities of art. (John Sloan)
The Master knows it is a life long process of patience... (Carolyn Smith)
The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation. (Frederick Sommer)
If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid. (Joaquin Sorolla)
I stared in disbelief at the spontaneous brushwork of John Constable's on-site oil sketches... brushstroke after brushstroke built into a cohesive interpretation... (John Stobart)
I wanted to be with the men I admired rather than the Scottish Arts Council crowd, so I spent a lot of time in graveyards. You get less trouble from the dead. (Alexander Stoddart)
I am a poor student sitting at the feet of giants, yearning for their wisdom and begging for lessons that might one day make me a complete artist, so that if all goes well, I may one day sit beside them. (Rod Taylor)
Mastery is an elusive concept. You never know when you achieve it absolutely and it may not help you to feel you've attained it. We can recognize it more readily in others than we can in ourselves. We have to discover our own definition of it. (Twyla Tharp)
One never hesitates before a masterpiece. (Shirley Thomson)
Don't hire a master to paint you a masterpiece and then assign a roomful of schoolboy artists to look over his shoulder and make suggestions. (Robert Townsend)
-on Rembrandt...
No painter knew so well the extent of his own powers and his own weakness. Conscious of the power as well as the necessity of shade, he took the utmost boundaries of darkness and allowed but one-third of light, which light dazzles the eye thrown upon some favorite point, but where is judgement kept pace with his choice, surrounded with impenetrable shade. (J. M. W. Turner)
Each and every master, regardless of the era or the place, heard the call and attained harmony with heaven and earth. (Morihei Ueshiba)
The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. (John Updike)
I had great masters. I took the best of them of their teachings, of their examples. I found myself, I made myself, and I said what I had to say. (Suzanne Valadon)
Artists shouldn't be bound up in their own work. For this reason, I have a special interest in studying the great art masters... a Liotard or Degas pastel... behind the results... a lot of work has been done. (Claudio Urzua Vial)
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. (Leonardo da Vinci)
The smallest feline is a masterpiece. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion. (Susan Vreeland)
-on E. J. Hughes...
I met Hughes at the Duncan Doghouse 5 days before he died. I touched his shoulder and it was like touching an angel. I had always wanted to meet him and by chance he was there that day. We left to pay at the same time and I introduced myself. I pointed to the prints on the wall and said that Nanaimo Harbour had been my favorite. He said, 'It's mine too.' He also said that he thought some of the reproductions looked better than the originals. I thought that was a modest thing to say. (Brian Wallace)
Mastery is primarily intuition. (Marney Ward)
To become masters, we need to be able to tap our inner creativity, and then combine the inspiration we receive from within with the technical skill that has come from years of experience. (Marney Ward)
What the masters have in common is that they brought something new and powerful to the idea. (Coulter Watt)
The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man. (James Abbott McNeill Whistler)
The discipline endured is the mastery achieved. (Edgar A. Whitney)
Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
Artists can learn a lot from studying the great works. We can put that knowledge to work for us in some fashion or another. Then perhaps, 50 years down the road, we will be teaching someone in a manner which we have never dreamed possible. (Wayne A. Wright)
All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. (William Butler Yeats)
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