Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts - I certainly have to laugh at myself - It's like feeling around in the dark - thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't - and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel - like a wreck - Have been working like mad all day - and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be - when the sun begins to go down - and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train - It is a very special sort of sick feeling.
Georgia O'KeeffeRelated topics
color dark day fair find gives head home laugh mad off ones paint sensation sick slaving sort sun ten thing thought train try water workingRelated quotes
But taking note of these things, at the last
The mariner beneath the gateway passed.
And there a lovely cloistered court he found,
A fountain in the mist o'erthrown and dry,
And in the cloister briers twining round
The slender shafts; the wondrous imagery
Outworn by more than many years gone by;
Because the country people, in their fear
Of wizardry, had wrought destruction here,
And piteously these fair things had been maimed;
There stood great Jove, lacking his head of might;
Here was the archer, swift Apollo, lamed;
The shapely limbs of Venus hid from sight
By weeds and shards; Diana's ankles light
Bound with the cable of some coasting ship;
And rusty nails through Helen's maddening lip.
William Morris
Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association. I have come across several types of association in America of which, I confess, I had not previously the slightest conception, and I have often admired the extreme skill they show in proposing a common object for the exertions of very many and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
At present, I am particularly excited by 'bad taste'. I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed 'The Work of Art'. I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.
Yves Klein
Malaya had a special contribution to make to world peace. One of the difficult problems of the world was to secure peace, freedom, and democratic government in countries inhabited by more than one community. It could not be done by one community seeking to dominate the others, but only by fair dealing and mutual tolerance. He sometimes thought that those who adopted extreme nationalist ideas did so because they had no constructive ideas and because an appeal to race prejudice saved them from an intolerable burden of thought. In his view the variations in the make-up of a community increased its value, and he wished good luck to all the peoples of Malaya in building up a great multi-racial community.
Clement Attlee
I am a zoologist and the naked ape is an animal. He is therefore fair game for my pen and I refuse to avoid him any longer simply because some of his behaviour patterns are rather complex and impressive. My excuse is that, in becoming so erudite, Homo sapiens has remained a naked ape nevertheless; in acquiring lofty new motives, he has lost none of the early old ones. This is frequently a cause of some embarrassment to him, but his old impulses have been with him for millions of years, his new ones only a few thousand at the most - and there is no hope of quickly shrugging off the accumulated genetic legacy of his whole evolutionary past. He would be a far less worried and more fulfilled animal if only he would face up to this fact. Perhaps this is where the zoologist can help.
Desmond Morris