I'd like you [Theo] to spend some time here, you'd feel it - after some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel colour differently. I'm also convinced that it's precisely through a long stay here that I'll bring out my personality. The Japanese [like a. o. Hokusai, admired by Vincent] draws quickly, very quickly, like a flash of lightning, because his nerves are finer, his feeling simpler. I've been here [Arles] only a few months but - tell me, in Paris would I have drawn in an hour the drawing of the boats?... Now this [sketch] was done without measuring, letting the pen go. So I tell myself that gradually the expenses will be balanced by work.
Vincent van GoghRelated topics
done draw eye few hour lightning measuring now pen see simpler sketch spend stay tell vision work nerves months theoRelated quotes
Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.
Frank Stella
Don't you drink I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky When you are cold and wet what else can warm you Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
Ernest Hemingway
It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. ... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg
Life passes, with us all, a day at a time; so it passed with our friend Tom, till two years were gone. Though parted from all his soul held dear, and though often yearning for what lay beyond, still was he never positively and consciously miserable; for, so well is the harp of human feeling strung, that nothing but a crash that breaks every string can wholly mar its harmony; and, on looking back to seasons which in review appear to us as those of deprivation and trial, we can remember that each hour, as it glided, brought its diversions and alleviations, so that, though not happy wholly, we were not, either, wholly miserable.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
At an unknown hour, from a source that is still sealed to us, but inexorable, the Work comes into the world. Cold calculations, splashes leaping up without plan, mathematically accurate construction (laid bare or concealed) silent, screaming drawing, scrupulous finish, colour in fanfares or played pianissimo on the strings, large, serene, cradling, fragmented planes. Isn't that a Form? Aren't those the means?
Suffering, seeking, tormented souls with a deep fissure, caused by the collision of the spiritual with the material... Shame on him who turns his soul's ear away from the mouth of art. A human being speaks to human beings about the superhuman – the language of art.
Wassily Kandinsky