dead color

When I saw Degas again, he happened to have a box of pastels in his hand, and was spreading them out on a board in front of the window. Seeing me watching him:
—I take all the color out of them that I can, by putting them in the sun.
—But what do you use, then to get colors of such brightness?
—Dead color, Monsieur.

—Ambroise Vollard (1886-1939, an important French art dealer) recounting Paul Cézanne's conversation with Edgar Degas.

[n.b.: quote was encountered yesterday as the epigraph to a limited edition of Charles Wright's poetry called Dead Color (Meadow Press for Charles Seluzicki, Fine Books, Salem OR, 1980)]

walk alone

I suggest that people who like to be alone, who walk alone, will perhaps be serious workers in the art field.

—Agnes Martin, Writings / Schriften (English and German Edition, Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Edition Cantz, 1992), edited by Dieter Schwarz

same drawing, same poem

I have made this drawing several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

I have made this poem several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

seeks its music

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of the poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation—that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. [45]

—Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (first published in Fortnightly Review, 1877), Essays on Literature and Art (J.M Dent & Sons, 1973)

no art, only artists

There is no such thing as art...There are only artists who are favoured with a gift of balancing shapes and colours until they get it right. And, rarer still, who possess the integrity of character which never rests content with half solutions, but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950)

to re-true

Seems to me, the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms—Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain—and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy. One doesn’t get very far without this love.

—John Marin, The Selected Writings of John Marin, edited by Dorthy Norman (Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949)

nothing ugly

There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, without inner or outer truth.

—Auguste Rodin

silent poetry

Painting was called “silent poetry”; and poetry “speaking painting.” The laws of each are convertible into the laws of every other.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Art” (1841)

locked within

Michelangelo always tried to conceive the figure as lying hidden in the block of marble on which he was working. The task he set himself as a sculptor was merely to remove the stone which covered them.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1950

archetypes

All art is memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in artists.

—Paul Klee

art is...

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

—Guy Davenport