Top 180 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Genn - Page 2

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.

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.

Do not be frivolous with the gift of a day. Right now it's all you have. Yesterday is history.

Artist, gain knowledge, but know that the greatest guru of all is the guru within.

Flowers are an education in a vase.

Accepting the gift may take the accumulated wisdom of some trodden miles, but it also opens the welcome windows of joy.

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.

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

Great paintings have gradations, large and small... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.

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

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

Canned reference is practically always loaded with problems. Photos, for example, contrive to kill imagination and stifle the natural development of creative patterns. While "ready-mades" do show up from time to time, they are rare. Art need not be what is seen-but what is to be seen. "Nature," said James McNeill Whistler, "is usually wrong."

I required a destination that was worthy of many visits.

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

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.

Style essentially appeared out of what I liked to do.

The pursuit of art is a delicate balance between influence and self-assertiveness. As self-realized artists, we all have different levels of tolerance for this mystery. Influence is like Scotch; it's good to know your personal limit.

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.

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.

Silent guns have virtue.

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

Art is a Great Goddess of infinite intrigue and illusion, and even a lifetime of worship may not find her fickle soul.

Whatever you do, don't let your system run you.

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

It's my wish that I can help creative people think of new ways to be creative - to get more joy and understanding from their own unique processes.

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

I find that as I get into a painting I have high hopes, then little by little I begin to see that it is not going to be the masterpiece I thought it would be, and I start putting my hopes into the next work.

When I'm in the studio I often hunger for the road. And when away I long for the efficiency of the studio.

In life and art we need to make sure that we honour that which our hearts and brains tell us is good. And we should cast a philosophic yet curious smile at that which our hearts and brains tell us otherwise.

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

I simply like the monumentality of the subjects - the opportunity for metaphor and the varied light that comes with high altitudes.

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.

Paintings, like tombstones, will last a good five hundred years, well into twenty or thirty generations.

It's okay to doubt. It's important to test. The way to discover secrets is to be a student of your own efforts.

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.

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

Well considered abandonment is a trusted teacher.

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

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.

Where there are few expectations, expediency wins.

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.

Dealer goodwill and friendship are keys to thrival.

We artists allow others to see through our windows.

Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.

A painting has an intrinsic value which has nothing to do with critical assessments.

Life is a passage through a museum of beauty.

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

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.

The painting world is awash with people who cannot paint. This is a condition that would not be tolerated in other professions such as Dentistry, Medicine, or among members of the Airline Pilot's Association.

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

Learning to focus and pay attention, if only for a short time, has been identified as a primary key to the development of human effectiveness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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