Printmakers

2583 quotes found

"At first when I saw 'The Sick Child' [in his imagination] her pallid face and the vivid red hair against the pillow – I saw something that vanished when I tried to paint it. I ended up with a picture on the canvas which, although I was pleased with it, bore little relationship to what I had seen.. ..In the space of that year [1885 – 1886], scratching it out, just letting the paint flow, endlessly I tried to recapture what I had seen for the first time – the pale transparent skin against the linen sheets, the trembling lips, the shaking hands. I repainted the painting numerous times – scratched it out – let it become blurred in the medium – and tried again and again to catch the first impression – the transparent pale skin against the canvas – the trembling mouth – the trembling hands. I had done the chair [in which his sister Sophie had died] with the glass too often. It distracted me from doing the head. – When I saw the picture I could only make out the glass and the surroundings. – Should I remove it completely? – No, it had the effect of giving depth and emphasis to the head. – I scared off half the background and left everything in masses – one could now see past and across the head and the glass.. .I had achieved much of that first impression, the trembling mouth – the transparent skin – the tired eyes – but the picture was not finished in its colour – it was pale grey – the picture was then heavy as lead. [Munch showed the painting on the Autumn Exhibition 18 October 1886; it was criticized severely, even by his bohemian art-friend Jager]"

- Edvard Munch

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"If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation. If we begin at once to break the bonds that bind us to nature and to devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and independent form, we shall produce works that are mere geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet. Beauty of form and colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists obsessed with the idea of "beauty". It is because our painting is still at an elementary stage that we are so little able to be moved by wholly autonomous colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no farther than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. When we remember however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away. The first stage has arrived."

- Wassily Kandinsky

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"In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened ; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance ; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections ; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method ; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas."

- Auguste Rodin

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"I feel it, but I cannot express it,... I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous ; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah ! what an admirable scorn of notoriety ! The signature is what destroys us. We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. Thèse kings and queens, on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one another, and they interpreted ; they did not copy. They made clothed figures ; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush to use ! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century ; they would hâve laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves. How curious it would hâve been to hear them, to be present at their gatherings, where they must hâve discussed in amusing phrases, and with simple, deep ideas !... Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven...""

- Auguste Rodin

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"Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients ; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects ; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician ? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me."

- Auguste Rodin

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"I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful. The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art. In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet."

- Auguste Rodin

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"Yes it was 1949. How I came to that. That's like how one gets to know a human being. It so happens that I've always had a preference – as everyone has prejudices and preferences – for the square as a shape in preference to the circle as a shape. And I have known for a long time that a circle always fools me by not telling me whether it's standing still or not. And if a circle circulates you don't see it. The outer curve looks the same whether it moves or does not move. So the square is much more honest and tells me that it is sitting on one line of the four, usually a horizontal one, as a basis. And I have also come to the conclusion that the square is a human invention, which makes it sympathetic to me. Because you don't see it in nature. As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. We know this because we can see it in the microscope. On the other hand, we believe we see circles in nature. But rarely precise ones. Nature, it seems, is not a mathematician. Probably there are no straight lines either. Particularly not since Einstein says in his theory of relativity that there is no straight line, rod knows whether there are or not, I don't. I still like to believe that the square is a human invention. And that tickles me. So when I have a preference for it then I can only say excuse me."

- Josef Albers

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"The Chinese regarded not acknowledging the brush and the marks it makes as a bit crude; to them, that was trying to cover something up, so not such a high form of art. European art historians don't look at China very much. But I suspect Rembrandt must have known Chinese drawings, and had probably seen a few. Amsterdam was a port, and the Dutch were trading a great deal in the Far East. For example, a Chinese master looking at Rembrandt's drawing of a family, now in the British Museum, would recognise it as a masterwork. (...) The trace of Rembrandt's hand is still alive. Your eye can go back and forth between brown ink: sister; fast mark: mother. How rewarding this is, to move from the physical surface of the paper to its disappearance when you read the “subject”, and then back again. How many marvelous layers does this drawing have? The mother has a double profile, Picassoesque. Was it an accident with the pen that he then used as a master would? Both profiles are fascinating about her character. Her skirt is a bit ragged, without any real detail; one seems to know this, and then marvels at how these few lines suggest it. Then, there's a passing milkmaid, perhaps glancing at a very common scene, and we know the milk pail is full. You can sense the weight. Rembrandt perfectly and economically indicates this with – what? Six marks, the ones indicating her outstretched arm. Very few people could get near this. It is a perfect drawing."

- Rembrandt

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"I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way."

- Louise Bourgeois

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"He never appeared to me to be that lover of low society and gross mirth which you describe; but silent and reserved he was, till he discovered that his companions upon any given occasion were frank and liberal. His own patriotism and free principles then began to peer forth, and occasionally rose to enthusiastic fervour. I remember being assembled with him and a few other artists, most of whom are since dead, at the Prince of Wales coffee-house (then newly opened): the purpose of the meeting was to form a fund and institute a Society for the relief of decayed artists, &c., where Gillray discovered no deficiency either of good sense, benevolent feeling, or gentlemanly propriety of conduct; yet there was an eccentricity about him, which being no unusual concomitant of genius, was felt to be agreeable. After business and supper were concluded, we drank toasts; and when it came to his turn to name a public character, the Juvenal of caricature surprised those who knew him but superficially, by proposing that we should drink David! (the French painter). He was by this time a little elated, having become pleased with his associates, and having drowned his reserve in the flow of soul, and, kneeling reverentially upon his chair as he pronounced the name of the (supposed) first painter and patriot in Europe, he expressed a wish that the rest of the company would do the same. This was after our artist had transferred his nominal allegiance to the Pitt party;—before David had been guilty of the worst of those revolutionary atrocities which stain his character, and while his artistical reputation in this country stood much higher than since we have had ocular opportunity of appreciation his professional merit."

- James Gillray

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"In Des Moines, we live on a quiet street in a beautiful old wooded neighborhood. Our house is surrounded by a large yard with three century-old oak trees, bushes, and perennials. I have my own study with all my print history books. My printmaking studio is in the basement of our house. I have a 36 x 60" American French Tool etching press. From 1970, when we moved to Des Moines after graduate school, until 1997 I worked primarily as an artist and a teacher of printmaking, design, and art history. In 1974, I began to curate exhibitions on the history of prints for the DMAC, then was invited to do projects for other museums. In 1997, after I had been doing guest curatorial projects for 20 years, the DMAC finally created my part-time position as curator of prints (now prints and drawings). My responsibilities at the museum include organizing three or four exhibitions a year on prints and drawings, writing gallery guides and labels, gallery talks, doing research on works in the permanent collection, recommending acquisitions, advising on conservation, working as part of the curatorial team, cultivating collectors and donors, etc. We don't have a public print room, so there is no public access to the collection. I am staff liaison for the Des Moines Art Center Print Club, a very active group of print collectors, artists, and people interested in prints. They organize monthly programs, commission prints, and purchase works for the collection."

- Amy Namowitz Worthen

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