J.V. Constable Quotes
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
Light - dews - breezes - bloom - and freshness; not one of which... has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.
It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.
It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes Present the object, but the Mind descries. We see nothing till we truly understand it.
The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork.those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful.
When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.
Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy.
Speaking to a lawyer about pictures is something like talking to a butcher about humanity.
My lady's presence makes the roses red, because to see her lips they blush for shame.
But You know Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her that I look for fame - and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to Man.
We must bear in recollection that the sentiment of the picture is that of solemnity, not gaiety & nothing garish, but the contrary - yet it must be bright, clear, alive fresh, and all the front seen.
Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.
The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher.
I know very well what I am about and that my skies have not been neglected, though they often failed in execution - and often no doubt from over anxiety about them.
I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting.
I paint by all the daylight we have and that is little enough, less perhaps than you have by much... imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass.
all the gods are the same unknowable mystery, just as each face of a jewel strikes light in a different direction
This life is a dance, not a battle. We are all part of this world, not masters of it.
Only think that I am now writing in a room full of Claudes... almost of the summit of my earthly ambitions.
It seems to me them that sees an evil thing unfold and don't do nothin' to prevent it, are just as bad as them that does the evil.
It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.
A sketch will not serve more than one state of mind & will not serve to drink at again & again — in a sketch there is nothing but the one state of mind — that which you were in at the time.
There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.
No man who can do any one thing well will be able to any different thing equally well.
My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular?
The landscape painter must walk in the fields with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty.
Ingenuousness is skewed by the cracks in the mirrors of the eye caused by the blunders of the insincere
If you hold back for fear of making a mistake you will never accomplish what you must.And with each challenge you will become stronger.
