James Elkins Quotes

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

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.

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.

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer

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

To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when a painting's finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place.

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.

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

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

The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally it is beyond the range of printed pictures.

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

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.

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