Best 1116 quotes in «drawing quotes» category

When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.

When I write... I am in the fond arms of a childhood friend upon whose colorful heart I can hang the charcoal drawings of my woes.

When she started with the first empty canvas, she didn’t know what she was going to paint, she just let her paint brushes glide and they religiously followed the trajectory of her angst; the choice of colours and the strokes, they were all a reflection of what was going through her mind. The reds were the embers within her that refused to die. The blues were the rare instances when she was spent by her grief. The blacks were her moments of absolute weakness, the colour of the bottomless pit within her that she had plunged into, falling through and through. The brush strokes moved around blank canvases like snakes with fangs of elixir that filled her scars with a deluge of hope and a gale of faith in herself. The colours spoke to her in whispers, narrating their own tale while she poured out hers to them. They allowed her to channel her life through them. They listened. They cared. They laughed. They cried. They reassured her that there was life waiting ahead, staring at her past, urging her forward with eager arms. And Preeti rushed into them with her brush in hand that rose along with her and fell along with her.

When you are drawing, you are always one or two marks ahead. You're always thinking, 'After what I'm doing here I'll go there, and there.' It's like chess or something. In drawing I've always thought economy of means was a great quality - not always in painting, but always in drawing.

When we were in New York, you cried for two days and passed out. You said a word in your sleep, over and over. Akinli.” Elizabeth stared down at the drawing. “At first I thought it was gibberish. And then I thought it was the name of a town or a building. . . . I didn’t figure out it belonged to a person until you made that.” Elizabeth pointed down to the paper, worn from being folded and unfolded who knew how many times. “When Elizabeth came to me, I had to tell her the truth, and we decided to find him. You gave us the name of the town. We went there looking for someone answering to that name, fitting this image.” Miaka smiled ruefully. “Very small town. It wasn’t hard.” Tears pooled in my eyes. “You’ve really seen him?” They both nodded. I thought about all those trips they had taken, making up ridiculous stories so they could get to him without me knowing. “How is he?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity. “Is he okay? Has he gone back to school? Is he still with Ben and Julie? Is he happy? Could you tell? Is he happy?” The questions tumbled out without me being able to hold them in. I was desperate to know. I felt a single word would put my soul at ease. Elizabeth swallowed hard. “That’s the thing, Kahlen. We’re afraid he’s dying.

With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

You fear mistakes, but you shouldn't. Mistakes are your best friends as an artist. Embrace them. Seek them out. Draw with the purpose of making mistakes. When I was in one of those progressive European art schools when I was a young lad, all the teachers did was setting you up to make mistakes. Because with mistakes comes discovery. At one point you develop a system that is based on making mistakes. It's called experimenting. You produce 100 mistakes and you get 1 gem. You have now truly advanced, because you progressed with awareness. On a smaller scale. There is a shitty line in your drawing. Great. Pay more attention to it in your next drawing. Or schedule in some line practice. Ignore perfection. You want mistakes. Mistakes are what you should go for. Mistakes are your best friends. They don't lie to you and tell you what you need to know. Cherish them. Look at them for what they are. They are you. And you need them. Every time you make a mistake and you see it, you should be happy. Start looking for mistakes. Make them on purpose. Train yourself. Practice making mistakes till you are comfortable with them. Nothing comes for free, except the gift of mistakes.

A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.

Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.

Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.

A cool tattoo design is any drawing that would also look good saggy.

A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.

Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth of the utmost power, vigor, and activity of man's nature.

Actually, I don't really draw that well. It's just that I don't stop trying as quickly. I keep at it. I happen to have high standards and I try to meet them. I have to struggle like hell to make a drawing look good.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

A drawing, brought by Colonel Coombs, from a sculptured column in a cave-temple in the South of India, represents the first pair at the foot of the ambrosial tree, and a serpent entwined among the heavily-laden boughs, presenting to them some of the fruit from his mouth.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.

A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.

Above and beyond drawing my creations, I try to incorporate some kind of message. I try not to end as merely a question but try to provide a conclusion within the work.

A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

After I did the drawings of trees combining them with words, I started doing - I did that for a very short time. Then it kind of - that sort of evolved into just showing the branches of a tree coming down into the trunk and then going into the root system. So I showed both the branches and the roots of a tree, which were about equal. There is as much going on under the ground as is going on above the ground, which you can see.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.

A gift, like a good friend drawing a personal road map out of the crazy busy swirl of our overloaded lives.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

Alas! how many souls there are full of self, and yet desirous of doing good and serving God, but in such a way as to suit themselves; who desire to impose rules upon God as to His manner of drawing them to Himself. They want to serve and possess Him, but they are not willing to be possessed by Him.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work models, studies thoughts, conversations, are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

All my drawings always sort of looked funny even if I was trying to do serious stuff and express myself about grim situations. It was always cartoony.

Also, I think having that comic gene kind of makes you look at things in a different way. If you take yourself so seriously, eventually you end up one of those people having a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on their lives. You see them drawing the curtains and they don't even realize that they've kind of drifted off somewhere.

All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.

All the old bogeys of 'dignified subject-matter,' of 'balanced compositions,' of 'correct drawing' were laid to rest. The artist was responsible to no one but his own sensibilities for what he painted and how he painted it.

All true education is the drawing out from the student what is already there. Teaching is never about helping others to learn but about helping them to remember. All learning is remembering. All teaching is reminding. All lessons are memories, recaptured.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

All that you need in the way of technique for drawing is bound up in the technique of seeing - that is, of understanding, which after all is mainly dependent on feeling. If you attempt to see in the way prescribed by any mechanical system of drawing, old or new, you will lose the understanding of the fundamental impulse. Your drawing becomes a meaningless diagram and the time so spent is wasted.

All the drawing lacks is the final touch: To add eyes to the dragon

All those people who went out [to Occupy Wall Street] missed work, didn't get paid. Those were individuals who were already feeling the effects of inequality, so they didn't have a lot to lose. And then the individuals who were louder, more disruptive and, in many ways, more effective at drawing attention to their concerns were immediately castigated by authorities. They were cordoned off, pepper-sprayed, thrown in jail.

Almost every cartoonist, when he's sitting down to draw a funny face, if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he's drawing. But when I would write a story - I know it's going to sound almost ridiculous and infantile - I would, in a way, start living it.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

...Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with...I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves.

Always think of drawing, getting the forms realized, emphasizing the design.

A man is skillful at woodraft just in proportion as he approaches this balance. Knowing the wilderness can be comfortable when a less experienced man would endure hardship. Conversely, if a man endures hardships where a woodsman could be comfortable, it argues not his toughness, but his ignorance or foolishness, which is exactly the case with our blatant friend of the drawing-room reputation.