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It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use. (Sam Abell)
You barely have to clean your brushes - just a quick rinse in thinner and a soak in motor oil. They stay flexible and keep their shape beautifully. When a stray bristle begins to stick out from the brush, trim it with a razor. (Cristina Acosta)
The sewing machine is my brush and pencil; hundreds of colors of thread have become paint for realistic and abstract images set on various backgrounds. (B. J. Adams)
Besides surface qualities, such as rough and smooth, dull and shiny, hard and soft, textiles also includes colour, and, as the dominating element, texture, which is the result of the construction of weaves. Like any craft it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art. (Anni Albers)
To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over. (Anni Albers)
Paint with whatever material you please – with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, painted paper, or newspapers. (Guillaume Apollinaire)
The hand is the tool of tools. (Aristotle)
Ideally, one should have more material than one can possibly cope with. (Frank Auerbach)
The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else... (Marcus Aurelius)
Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing. (Marcus Aurelius)
I use all sorts of things to work with: old brooms, old sweaters, and all kinds of peculiar tools and materials... I paint to excite myself, and make something for myself. (Francis Bacon)
A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette. All I had was myself. I was the instrument that I must care for. (Josephine Baker)
Being familiar with art materials and what you can do technically, will only heighten your ability to express emotion. (Donna Baspaly)
For a while, I was drawing on good paper, but now I've gone back to the bad stuff. I put matte medium on it. If you put matte medium on it, it seals up, so it doesn't really matter. (Jean-Michel Basquiat)
The materials I use are absolutely essential to the work I make. (David Batchelor)
The initial stages of my work are painted with a very standard one inch house painter's brush... then on to a combination of 14, 12 and 10 short flat acrylic brushes... as they allow me to achieve exactly the movement of paint I require. (Mary Batchelor)
There is joy in feeling the bristles of a quality brush, seeing the richness and lush color of truly good pigment flowing onto the paper or canvas. The cheap stuff just makes for harder work and lesser results. (Gene Black)
Material and its memory (in collage) have become the subject in direct statements from the real world. (Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh)
I wove the web out of string, just like a spider. You can go up to her and touch her. (Shary Boyle)
I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually... Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. (Georges Braque)
I don't want to encourage the production of toxic materials if I can find alternatives. (Kristi Bridgeman)
Working with mylar, a transparent plastic film often used by architects, has challenged me... Because it is not entirely manageable... my work has become more colourful and evocative, not to mention more fun! (David Butt)
To me, art supplies are always okay to buy. (Louis C.K.)
Steel is such a nice material to use. It can move. It's terribly easy, you just stick it or you cut it off, and bang! you're there: it's so direct. I think Manet was very direct, he didn't prepare his canvases like Courbet, he just put paint straight on and it's very like that with steel. (Anthony Caro)
I work in a very humble material and that suits me just fine. (Toni Cavelti)
Take materials that represent you best and go for it! (Schar Chappell)
If you work with hot glass and its natural properties, it begins to look like something that came from the sea. (Dale Chihuly)
Glass is the most magical of all materials. It transmits light in a special way... (Dale Chihuly)
When an artist of talent makes a painting or a sculpture, he is always aware of the potentials and limitations of his materials; the better the artist, the more likely he is to know just what he can and cannot do with them. (Bruce Cole)
When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot. (John Constable)
Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. (Eustace Conway)
-Shop Class as Soulcraft...
For humans, tools point to the necessity of moral inquiry. Because nature makes only ambiguous prescriptions for us, we are compelled to ask, what is good? If you give a young boy a hammer for the first time and watch his face, you will see an awareness of this burden dawning on him (as he turns to the cat, for example). (Matthew B. Crawford)
When mountains and waters are painted, blue, green, and red paints are used, strange rocks and wondrous stones are used, the four jewels and the seven treasures are used. Rice-cakes are painted in the same manner. When a person is painted, the four great elements and five skandhas are used. (Dogen)
To further or enhance the struggle along this razor's edge between possibility and actuality, any tools are legitimate as long as these tools don't dull the edge. (Dean Taylor Drewyer)
Yes; I am a supercargo; pen, ink, and paper are my tools, and without my tools I am fit for nothing. (Alexandre Dumas)
Every master knows that the material teaches the artist. (Ilya Ehrenberg)
Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to... (James Elkins)
Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids... mixed together with powdered stones to give color... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal. (James Elkins)
I don't want to admit that the best I can do with that expensive piece of paper is to inflict my mediocre work on its pristine purity. (Olinda Everett)
I used anything, various materials; this is wood, and this is mixed up clay, wedged together, clay with glazes and stuff like that. (Joe Fafard)
I can use a toothbrush or a mop. There's no magic brush that I wield. (Peter Fiore)
Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials. (Helen Frankenthaler)
Paints are a pushy, wild bunch... no damn manners... (Eric Frantz)
As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does. (Lucian Freud)
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. (Erich Fromm)
Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel. (Theophile Gautier)
With materialization in play you have magic in your fingers and you become the wizard. (Robert Genn)
I use natural fibres like wool, silk, cashmere, mohair, alpaca, hemp and flax – which I have dyed – to create hand made felt landscapes. (Maggie Glossop)
Understanding the materials I work with... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older. (Andy Goldsworthy)
I have found that by using simple art materials, we are able to tap into a soft and tender place that is begging for attention. This soft tender place is our connection with our true essence, our spirit, and our soul's longings. (Mary A. Gravelle)
Know your art equipment and take care of it. (Irwin Greenberg)
Buy the best materials you can afford. (Irwin Greenberg)
Don't be intimidated by your materials. (George De Groat)
Stones, pigments, graphite, charcoal, pastel dust... may seem like dust, with little value. In the hands of an artist, however, they can become something transcendent, priceless, rendering the feelings of the maker and transmitting to us feelings and sympathies that we could not ourselves name. (Peggy Hadden)
We broke into Mir using a Swiss Army knife. Never leave the planet without one. (Chris Hadfield, astronaut)
I like to have rope, jute, feathers, even driftwood on hand to study. Then things begin to happen – mentally. (Horathel Hall)
It's not the tool you use, but the Tool using the tool. (Andrew Hamilton)
How did paintings by Tintoretto and other Venetian Renaissance artists get their special glow? ...one of their tiny secrets: bits of glass mixed with their pigments. (Carl Hartman)
Swing a bigger brush – you don't know what you're missing. (Charles Hawthorne)
Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created. (Werner Karl Heisenberg)
I move very slowly. It's usually material first. I sit with the material for a long time. (Jim Hodges)
Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement. (Thomas Hoving)
Painting is so much more than the materials. (Brian Johnson)
Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, food, chairs, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists... (Allan Kaprow)
Old brushes are broken into work and have developed a mind of their own and respond to our mind beautifully. They must not be discarded. (Nader Khaghani)
Don't overlook some of the best tools you have in your possession – your fingers and hands. (Earl Grenville Killeen)
Concrete is momentarily unformed matter seeking its natural completion, filling in the last corners of its allowed space, finding a form. It is possibility rendered material, hope in an industrial-strength mixer. (Mark Kingwell)
In front of paint brushes and canvas, my hands react to them and make my work before I think of anything. Then, when the piece is completed, I look at it, and am surprised by the result - always. (Yayoi Kusama)
-on J.E.H. MacDonald, 1979...
He always carried a heavy ulster folded over his arm and a collapsible umbrella which he stuck in the ground. He sat on a rock on his ulster, with his nose running all the time, made tea in a pail which he cached at Oesa and Opabin... with stubby brushes worn down to the metal. (George Link)
Make your drawing instrument an extension of your brain, heart, eyes, and hand. (Mick Maslen)
My paint brushes are having a 'bad hair' day! (Lori McNee)
Anything is good painting material once you get to know it. (David Milne)
I use a special tool. I make it myself; very sharp steel point and a handle like a pencil. For me it is a pencil. Maybe I have a special talent, a feeling you might say that lets me control it, to express my ideas as though I were sketching black on white. (Ugo Mochi)
To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I. (Robert Motherwell)
I do make my own brushes and have done so for many years. I'm constantly refining the designs, trying new materials, re-configuring other brushes - all in my never-ending quest for the perfect brush. (James Nares)
I frequently use my fingers to blend or soften a wet area... fingers can be useful tools with a rapidly drying medium like acrylic. (Michael Nevin)
The artistic capability of reinforced concrete is so fantastic - that is the way to go. (Oscar Niemeyer)
For me it is the direct contact of artist to material which is original, and it is the earth and his contact to it which will free him of the artificiality of the present and his dependence on industrial products. (Isamu Noguchi)
When forced to create with what little you have around you, you realize the gifts you truly have. (Kevin Obregon)
- burying one of his tired Chinese brushes...
Back to the earth from which you came. (Toni Onley)
Collecting reference material, priming the board on which I will paint, squeezing paint from the tubes and watching it glisten on the palette, holding well-used brushes, mixing the squelchy colour and applying it in broad swathes to build up the image, varnishing, framing and then seeing the finished article on a gallery wall – every stage gives me a thrill. (Deborah Phillips)
It is not the brush you bring to the canvas but what you bring to the brush. (Todd Plough)
Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint, the brushes I use are used more as sticks rather than brushes – the brush doesn't touch the surface of the canvas, it's just above. (Jackson Pollock)
We need to warranty our work for generations. (Colin Poole)
I love the printmaking aspect of using resists and transferring shapes with things such as manipulated cloth and threads, leaves, plastics, mosses, etc. (Susan Prahl)
Keep those brushes clean and ready to go! (John Stuart Pryce)
Junk art, assemblage art... it's as close to human existence because it's all the castoffs we are utilizing here. I won't say that assemblage art is much like life itself, but it's closer to existence than any other art form. Because it's your shit that we're remodeling... and you got rid of it. (Noah Purifoy)
-from Disease of Workers, the first known treatise, 1713...
I have observed that nearly all the painters I know, both in this and other cities, are sickly. Especially the most distinguished. For they handle and smell red lead, cinnabar, white lead, varnish, nut oil and linseed oil, as well as pigments made from various mineral substances. (Bernardini Ramazzini)
A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric. (Robert Rauschenberg)
A canvas is never empty. (Robert Rauschenberg)
The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit. (Odilon Redon)
It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
There can be no doubt but that he who has the most materials has the greatest means of invention... (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
With a brush you have control. The paint goes on the brush and you make the mark. From experience you know exactly what will happen. With the squeegee you lose control. (Gerhard Richter)
We must remember that everything depends on how we use a material, not on the material itself... New materials are not necessarily superior. Each material is only what we make it. (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)
Not worrying about the cost of materials and tools extends my artistic freedom. (Jim Rowe)
-The Gift of Water...
Every object and being in the universe is a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth more shining, as though covered in satin. (Rumi)
The hand in the eye is the ultimate tool. (Randy Sanders)
I work hard at mixing colors, at applying the paint, at feeling the brush. That's my material. And I have a responsibility to do it as clearly as possible. (Mark Schlesinger)
Do not just pick up the brushes you used and cleaned yesterday because they are there. Put those back, look at all of them, and then choose your weapon, like a type of gun or a certain type of sword. You are going into battle and you want the best weapon for the job. (Richard Schmid)
Use lots of paint and don't worry, they will make more... (Richard Schmid)
I work with things left over from other things. (Julian Schnabel)
I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings; they suited the purpose just as well as factory-made paints... It is possible to cry out using bits of old rubbish, and that's what I did, gluing and nailing them together. (Kurt Schwitters)
No mode of creation is more direct or naturally arrived at than the accumulation and agglomeration of materials found close at hand. (William Seitz)
If I am using a sable, it may start off as an eight or seven, but it's a double aught by the time I'm done. I hate brights... they have no use. You might as well buy a filbert and take the scissors and cut off half of what you paid for. (Nelson Shanks)
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. (Ted Shawn)
Don't be stingy with your paint, it isn't worth it. (John Sloan)
It is the reformation of material which is what art is all about... we reform it to where it does that tuning fork to our knowledge of form within. (Mark Di Suvero)
- regarding the simple materials he used during Arte Povera time, such as straw and string...
The highest wisdom adopts the humblest of bodies. (Antoni Tapies)
Oh, please do not ask me about what paints I use and which brushes I like! The art materials don't matter because art is all about relationships and harmony, which can be achieved with any paints. What matters is how you use the materials. (Aleksander Titovets)
Preparing my materials [from scratch] each morning gives me a chance to get my mind into painting before getting started, like rehearsing before a performance. (Thomas Torak)
It took me over a couple of months to find the right piece of transparent paper for a section near the centre, on the right side of the Garden of Nebuchadnezzar. When I did find it, it was on a bottle of my wife's toilet water. (Harold Town)
- b.1511 d.1574...
It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience... so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense. (Giorgio Vasari)
Today, art weighs less than its material structure. (Milos Vujasinovic)
Medias are in flux, and artists are rewarded for exploring the new media partly by the industries that generate the new materials and tools. (Jerry Waese)
I pick up a two-inch Sabelite brush. It feels right. I play with it – no paint – to get the feel... I like the bristles – they feel good on the skin. I want to do some plein air. (Annette Waterbeek)
I was working with mud and photographs and thread, eyelashes, carrots and acetone... I was throwing radios off buildings and... remember floating styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River. (William Wegman)
A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army. (Orson Welles)
See it in terms of paint. We don't learn subject matter, we learn paint. The musician can play any score that is set before him. (Helen van Wyk)
I work with just about anything: paint, wood, glass, plastic, fabric, etc. I use a lot of 'found' and 'altered-function' objects in my work... By 'altered-function,' I mean objects that one buys new, let's say, at a hardware store, and uses in a way contrary to its designer's intent. (Burnell Yow!)
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