Robert Genn Quotes

Our bodies, apart from their brilliant role as drawing exercises, are the temples of our being. Like the bodies of all fauna, they deserve both our study and our appreciation.

The problem with University degrees, particularly the more spectacular ones, is that people who possess them can fall into the trap of thinking people who don't have them don't know anything.

The centipede has rhythm and flow in its hundred legs precisely because it does not have to think about it. Consider this the next time you move the instruments of your art.

The job of art is to turn time into things.

A drawing a day keeps the cobwebs away.

One of the ways to learn is to know when you're making failures.

The brilliance of art as a collectible is that it has a way of reaching out on an emotional level. It touches on mystery, even spirituality.

Keep busy while you are waiting for something to happen.

Art is a form of love. Art is the ultimate gift. Art heals life.

The only bad studio is the unused one.

When you serve your passions, proficiency gradually takes over and becomes habitual.

Know that to begin is often better than to think.

One compositional element suggests and asks for another. This is what makes the activity interesting.

Inspiration comes from doing.

Never forget that the nurturing and preservation of your own muse is job one. Lose it and you may be losing a great deal.

While obsessive behavior may be an antisocial plague to societies and communities at large, it's total moxie when lone practitioners catch it.

We have been mysteriously gifted this amazing life. Let us not complain.

I do know, for most of us, the very best of times are when you're in your own space sweating, trying to squeeze quality out of imperfect capabilities.

Passion is the force that springs an artist from the needling cushion of depression.

Priests are often well-meaning people who haven't yet looked too thoroughly into comparative religion.

Quality is always in style.

Visual tonics such as 'timed creativity' need to be introduced to refresh and refurbish the muse.

Art, because it's so easy to do, and yet so difficult to do well, encourages humility in the human soul.

A curiosity prompt heightens the senses and hones compositional ability.

With repetition, the alternate approaches become clear, options open.

God may work in light, but we mortals work in pigment.

For all of us, self-briefing before going out or starting a project sharpens artistic wit.

No one is going to hand you an organizational chart. You have to hand it to yourself.

Sentimental titles are the last bastion of scoundrels, and can add significant barf to an already barfy work.

Novelty is vital to the stimulation of life... New neural paths are sparked by caving in to notions.

Contrary to popular belief, all evolving artists are in a full time battle with mediocrity.

Drawing is still the bottom line.

We are not born focusing. It's an acquired skill that requires initial effort and constant upgrading.

The short-goal habit is key to larger success and is at the root of human greatness. Life is think and do, think and do, think and do. Small steps can be greater than great leaps.

Mountains in all their moods are symbols of something greater, something worth aspiring to. Mountains are powerful, dangerous, beautiful, noble and mysterious. Mountains get respect.

To float like a cloud you have to go to the trouble of becoming one.

It's better to have a small diamond than a large piece of glass.

Painters paint, and history continues to make fools of curators.

Factual titling satisfies and is pure by its lack of bamboozlement.

Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion.

Artists should be aware that petty stroking could be the source of arrested productivity. An artist's job includes the avoidance of premature closure by the begged or gratuitous approval of others.

We artists stick ourselves out. This in itself deserves respect.

Creativity is dynamic, it asserts life, frees the human spirit, conquers mental lassitude and illness, and makes real the outrageous potential of the universal imagination.

Objects are held by the backgrounds that are cut into them.

We are trying to evoke and reinforce meanings from the spaces we cover and the times we're given. Short or long this becomes our purpose. What we artists do is important stuff.

This evening, while signing my name on a painting, I was thinking I might stop signing my cheques.

Silent guns have virtue.

In life and art it's better to be an enthusiastic amateur than a jaded professional.

Risk in art is experimentation. There is no sorrow in self-driven experimentation.

As we grow older, we realize just how limiting were our earlier conceptions. Art is something else. Art is fluid, transmutable, open-ended, never complete, and never perfect. Art is an event.