A Quote by James Elkins

Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

James Elkins

Quote Topics

Been Centuries Comparison Consume Earlier Give License Look Made Modern Move Move On Often Paintings Quickly Seem Seems Them Us

Quote Author

James Elkins
American - Critic
Born: 1955

I look at my paintings for a very long time before letting them out of my studio. I like to get on the treadmill and look around at all of my paintings while I exercise. I try to stare them down to make them reveal their weaknesses. If they reveal weaknesses, they get repainted.

Sean Scully

I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.

Cecily Brown

People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.

David Salle

I think that people tend to look at the paintings as being resolved or finite. But, to me, a painting can be an index for all of the paintings I've done and all of the paintings I'm going to do. It's like if I'm doing a film of the Olympics, I'm not examining a specific sport; I'm interested in the overall context.

Sarah Morris

As far as paintings go, I always think about what it's like to move them and hang them up and hope they don't drop. To me, that seems like a big gamble, but that comes from me not being a painter.

Fred Armisen

I enjoy thinking about how paintings can change depending on where they are - how they look in a gallery or in relation to other paintings, or in different rooms. Paintings can change the way we experience and see the world.

Stephen Beal

Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.

Freddie Mercury

If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.

James Elkins

The spot paintings and spin paintings were trying to find mechanical ways to make paintings.

Damien Hirst

The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.

Lucian Freud

I'm expressing the feelings of mankind today through the Blue Dog. The dog is always having problems of the heart, of growing up, the problems of life. The dog looks at us and asks, 'Why am I here? What am I doing? Where am I going?' Those are the same questions we ask ourselves. People look at the paintings, and the paintings speak back to them.

George Rodrigue

You never, ever leave art school. It's important to keep finding inspiration. I look at YouTube videos and think, 'How would I do that?' I like experimenting with things. For instance, drying paintings off too quickly in a microwave can look strangely beautiful.

Vic Reeves

The thing I'm obsessed with is really great bad paintings. I have a storage locker full of them and I want to give them their own museum. You don't even know who these artists are - you can buy them at garage sales, antique stores and places like that. They're brilliant because they were done with the intention of being great, but the artist sort of made a wrong turn. Some of them are hilarious and I can't get enough of them.

Jennifer Coolidge

This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.