Robert Genn Quotes

Sometimes you can be lucky enough to establish a working relationship with another artist who takes away the loneliness, particularly in travel and outdoor work.

With materialization in play you have magic in your fingers and you become the wizard.

Exploit a subject or a theme to its greatest potential by bringing all possible reference to bear - then put aside the reference and create again using the potential of your unfettered imagination.

By thinking you are cleverer and more talented than your buddies, many a career has been blotted.

In the companionship of art we are all of a time. Early or late we are to be shared.

Many of us knuckle-dragging brush-painters think that 'behind the times' is part of our job description. Why deny ourselves the authentic journey of a time-honoured form?

Sometimes... we suffer from the tyranny of comparison. Contests, competitions, thrive on it. Who cares?

For a lot of us drawing is a tyranny which impedes freshness and spontaneity.

Landscape painting tends to fall under more academic controls. I must say I often like working within these controls. It gives me the feeling that I'm taking part in a noble tradition.

The head governs, the heart assists, the body acts.

Now familiar with my own particular voice and accent, my Dragon app prints out exactly what I speak into my iPad. Twenty years ago this miracle would be unthinkable.

My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love.

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

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.

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.

There is no progress without product.

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.

With cropping, a new integrity appears and winning abstractions flutter up like butterflies. You can afford to be critical, discriminating, innocent, open-minded, charmed, beguiled or bamboozled.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Evolved creators are just as curious about their failures as they are of their successes.

Curiosity allows your unique "owned processes" to draw you toward creative conclusions.

Watch the greater image materialize. You need that thing over there to tell you what to do about that thing over here.

Once as I sat painting, I became aware of a man's face hovering near me, moving closer and closer to the panel I was working on. When he spoke he said, 'That is a fantastic brush!

Fact is, perfection is boring.

As self-governing entities, artists have a profound interest in change. Embracing change, we embrace growth and we embrace our future.

The guy may be totally motivated, connected and inspired, but if he doesn't know how to do it, he's not the guy to take out your appendix.

Incompetence, in my books, is the failure of the critical faculties to interfere constructively with the natural flow.

By stealthily teaching dependence, photography can turn out to be dangerous.

Flat, uninteresting parts of paintings are, in fact, a ruse to get the viewer to see what needs to be seen.

I suppose what you're doing as a painter is making a record of your trip through life. I can't think of any job that is quite as satisfactory as doing a painting.

The overly-verbal artist is led by his understanding of things--rather than by direct observation of things as they are.

As every artist who has used the method knows - photography's a loyal slave and a tyrannical master.

Regarding ego force, we don't always like people who have it. If you have it, and need to be liked, you ought to consider letting most of it come out the end of your brush.

An opening and a receptiveness to design and pattern for its own sake seems to free the painting hand.

Well considered abandonment is a trusted teacher.

We artists give daily thanks for the miracle of our planet and for the inclination and the capability to honour it.

A young person wanting to become an artist might simply go purposefully and dedicatedly to his or her room with a few books and a thousand blank canvases for four years.

A method of achieving wild enthusiasm is to act wildly enthusiastic. Often, a growing and beautiful love-affair develops quite automatically.

I've come to realize that companionship and mild competition can help build quality and lay the ground for excellence.

When you sit down to paint or draw, you form yourself into a posture of praise

It is necessary to put yourself out for rejection, and accept that you will be rejected.

Our currency is what we are able to make.