Painting

"For Matisse in particular it often served to separate areas of contrasting colour, assisting in the vibrant activation of such juxtaposed blocks. While the Impressionist use of colour contrasts had concentrated mainly on the complimentary yellow and violet-blue pair, because these most aptly imitated the effects of sunlight and shadow in nature, Matisse shifted to the red-green complementaries. This pair creates the greatest optical vibration when juxtaposed because the two colours are closest in tone of any on the colour circle. As the eye tires of reading, say, the red as dominant, the green at once appears to come forward and dominate. This vacillation of the eye between the two colours vying for dominance sets up an optical vibration, which enhances the colour properties of each simultaneously. By focusing upon the red-green pair—which Matisse often biased towards pink-turquoise—he avoided the emphasis on the naturalistic representation associated with the Impressionists' use of colour. It was also a pair which, again because of tonal equivalence, affirmed the flatness of the picture surface by negating the illusion of depth."

"Matisse began to exploit the more abstract, and... vibrant, oppositions of red-green. ...[T]he properties of colour itself, and the interactions of colour with their power to create light, instead of reproducing the effect of light, were the basis of Matisse's mature art. Colour no longer stood for, or symbolized, anything external to painting itself; it was colour as colour."

"If they could forget for a moment the correggiosity of Correggio and the learned babble of the sale-room and varnishing Auctioneer."

"What avails, then, the folly of the painter, who from sinful love of gain depicts that which should not be depicted—that is, with his polluted hands he tries to fashion that which should only be believed in the heart and confessed with the mouth? He makes an image and calls it Christ."

"If anyone shall endeavor to represent the forms of the Saints in lifeless pictures with material colors which are of no value (for this notion is vain and introduced by the devil), and does not rather represent their virtues as living images in himself, let him be anathema!"

"A picture is a poem without words."

"Paint me as I am. If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling."

"Hard features every bungler can command: To draw true beauty shows a master's hand."

"Pictures must not be too picturesque."

"Paint me as I am," said Cromwell, "Rough with age and gashed with wars; Show my visage as you find it, Less than truth my soul abhors."

"Sixtenth century represents the zenith of Ottoman miniature painting. During this time, the influences of the late 15th and early 16th centuries—the encounters with western European portraiture, the growing emphasis on historiographical painting, the impact of ;nautical cartography, and the enduring influence of the Persian legacy – began to crystallize into distinctly Ottoman styles and genres."

"I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight."

": My painting will have to tell many stories. It should be large enough to hold everything. Everything, all the people. There must be a hundred of them. I will work like the spider I saw this morning building its web.First it finds an anchoring point. Here, the heart of my web."

"A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are."

"One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away."

"It was to the painters of the previous generation that Monet turned... Boudin summed up clothed figures in rapidly noted dashes of color... that... merged the identities of color and line; Jongkind... made sky, rooftops, water, and foliage shimmer in separate dabs of bright paint; Corot employed broad bands of buttery pigment to give the sense of sunlight streaking through foliage to fall on meadow or forest road; Diaz and Rousseau put spots of paint side by side to create a surface mosaic of foliage; Courbet commonly used opaque paint, scraped and dabbed with a palette knife, to form a patchwork of textured areas that adhered as much to surface as to imagined depth. ...Courbet ...insisted that one must paint what one actually sees ...Monet's improvised technique, "sketchy" even in the most finished areas, was ...a further development of the free, somewhat rough way of applying paint which had characterized the mid-century vanguard. In Courbet... free handling was equated with opposition to authority... For other[s] of the same generation, sketchiness was considered forward-looking, independent, and "democratic"... opposed to the highly finished surfaces of officially sanctioned art. Daubigny was accused of giving mere "impressions" of nature... and Millet's shaggy surfaces were treated... as appropriate to his peasant subjects. ...Sincerity, truth, immediacy, spontaneity, natural light, and color, the banishing of muddy colors, the distrust of smooth finish—these were the moral underpinnings of artistic technique that Monet adopted."

"Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh— To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye.Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What?"

"Delphinum sylvis appingit, fluctibus aprum."

"He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own."

"Nequeo monstrare et sentio tantum."

"Mughal painting is a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court of the Mughal Empire (16th - 19th centuries), and later spread to other Indian courts, both Muslim and Hindu, and later Sikh."