Printmakers

"The "rights of man" are the right of the less voracious to restrain those who are more so."

"When less than four years old I was standing with my nurse, Mary Ward, watching the shadows on the wall from branches of an elm behind which the moon had risen. I have never forgot those shadows and am often trying to paint them."

"It seems to me the charm of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows so that almost everything sparkles or suggest sparkles."

"Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities."

"The rights of the poor majority are pure air and pure water, and sufficient space to walk about in, when the rich minority are befouling the air with manufactories, poisoning the rivers, and as in the neighborhood of Foots Cray and St. Mary's, adding "field to field, till there be no place" left, and the villagers cannot step out of the dusty high-road without a trespass.."

"I don't suffer much from solitude in the evenings. I spring upon my books. I always spoke a good word for solitude, and it is grateful to me. Books ward off the ghastly thoughts."

"It seems to me that a great secret of early education is not to overrate the powers of attention in children. If they go to a church for instance, where there are long sermons, I should let them have scripture history, or lives of the Saints full of pictures, to be administered during the latter half of the discourse, rather than knuckle their ribs or prick them with pins, to make them "attend to what the gentleman says.""

"Migrating from continent to continent like a restless bird in search of propitious seasons, casting his glance across all cultures, Mark Tobey was one of the few 20th century artists who was truly cosmopolitan and in fact trans-avant-garde. Besides being a pioneer of American abstraction, he was a scholar of oriental calligraphy and Renaissance tempera."

"Bahá'í [religion] provided Tobey with aesthetic as well as social and religious principles. He has often stated that there can be no break between nature, art, science, religion, and personal life.. .Few religions.. ..have given the concept of oneness such pointed emphasis, and few modern artists have dealt with it as explicitly as has Tobey."

"I have sought a unified world in my work and use a movable vortex to achieve it."

"The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one – that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value."

"In 1953, 'Life Magazine' featured the three painters and titled it Mystic Painters of the Northwest: 'Painters of our misty light, shimmering lines and symbolic forms.. ..They embody a mystical feeling toward life and the universe." The three painters took the title lightly but they were entitled to be called Mystics: [Mark] Tobey the more intellectual, Graves the poet and Anderson the extrovert. All studied Buddhism in depth and Tobey and Graves traveled the Orient.'"

"I have just had my first lesson in Chinese brush from my friend and artist Teng Kwei. The tree is no more solid in the earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized. All is in motion now.. .One step backward into the past and the tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all rhythm, lifting, springing upward."

"Two men dressed in white jeans with white caps on their heads.. ..climbing over a large sign of white letters. Of course, the words spell something, but that is unimportant. What is important is their white, and the white of the letters."

"It is Fall. The leaves are being raked under the great elms darkening in the evening light. Slowly they become weighted with darkness. Across the river they are burning the grass on the Minnesota bluffs. Myriads of colored streamers reflect in the river blow.."

"We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain."

"We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit."

"On the third floor of Manning's Coffee Shop in the Farmer's Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows [an equivalent of the picture plane]. Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window, a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull's flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage.. .It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognizance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography."

"There has been 32 isms since the advent of Cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex."

"Now it seems to me that we are in a universalising period.. .If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us. And I would say that we are in a period when we are discovering and becoming acquainted with these idioms for the first time."

"The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up.. .But there was escape, too, even in those days, for there was Whistler living in the grey mists with a faded orange moon. The nocturne transformed itself into dreamy rooms with Chopin's music creating a mood that softened the hard core of self.[quote from conversation with Seitz]"

"Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol."

"We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement.. ..we must concentrate outside ourselves."

"England collapses, turns Chinese with English and American thoughts. Thousands of Chinese characters are turning and twisting; every door is a shop. The rickshaws jostle the vendors, their backs hung with incredible loads. The narrow streets are alive in a way that Broadway isn't alive. Here all is human, even the beasts of burden. The human energy spills itself in multiple forms, writhes, sweats and strains every muscle towards the day’s bowl of rice. The din is terrific."

"An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms."

"Our ground today is not so much the national or the regional ground as it is the understanding of this single earth. The earth has been round for some time now, but not in man’s relation to man, nor in the understanding of the arts of each as a part of that roundness. As usual we have occupied ourselves too much with the outer, the objective, at the expense of the inner world wherein tie true roundness lies.. .America more than any other country is placed geographically to lead in this understanding., and if from past methods of behaviour she has constantly looked towards Europe, today she must assume her position, Janus-faced, toward Asia, for in not too long a time the waves of the Orient shall wash heavily upon her shores. All this is deeply related with her growth in the arts, particularly upon the Pacific slopes. Of this I am aware. Naturally my work will reflect such a condition and so it is not surprising to me when an Oriental responds to a painting of mine as well as an American or an European.."

"I am accused often of too much experimentation.. ..but what else should I do when all other factors of man are in the same condition. I thrust forward into space as science and the rest do."

"Every artist's problem today is: What will we do with the human?"

"My first lesson in relativity: ..we had a still life set-up to paint. Suddenly I saw that the pitcher was so big [his hands outside the shape of a pitcher, then close in] and the glass was so big. From that time on everything was all right. [Tobey is remembering his Saturday morning painting class]"

"I have many ideas for lights. I will paint only lights at night. [on the twinkling city-lights]"

"White lines in movement symbolize a unifying idea which flows through the compartmented units of life bringing the consciousness of a larger relativity."

"At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit."

"From early on I developed an attraction for the incongruous. I had no wish to try to resolve visual contradictions. I felt that aesthetic disparities were actually questions, questions that I did not need to answer. By leaving the meaning up in the air I could provoke responses in the viewer that would trigger further questioning. What are these things I'm looking at and what do they mean? Each person seeing the painting will come away with a different idea."

"Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by."

"In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself."

"It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means."

"[Do you have a motto or creed that as an artist you live by?] Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea". And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you'll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere."

"The right creative act makes its own laws,and always will do."

"...there is a striking similarity in the surrealist and abstract painters attitude to the object;both have a horror of it in its proper context."

"The shadows cast in the house by sun shining inside are like those out of doors, except that they appear stronger and are more defined by a window or a door. Albrecht Dürer really enjoyed sun shining into a room in his 'Hieronymus in the Room' [https://www.Rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-1224.. .Our own Rembrandt concerned himself in an amazing way with sunlight reflections. It seems as though he is really in his element when reflecting any light whatsoever. If only he had understood the basic rules of this art a little better. Because those who only trust their own eyes and delusional experiences, often make mistakes that earn the derisive remarks from pupils, not to mention the masters."

"I therefore advise you not to put too many lights and shadows together, but to arrange them cleverly in groups. Allow your brightest lights subtly flow into the not so bright lights. I can assure you that they will light up all the more. Always surround your deepest and darkest areas with a clear brown, this way they will allow the light to brighten in strength and intensity. Rembrandt has used this virtue to great effect and he was expert in bringing together related colours."

"But the empty spaces [in the painting] devoid of all shine or reflection we put in the fifth and last grade, and see them as identical to the black, the deepest colour [tone]. This remark will make us careful not to try and go further than the ability of our paint/colour allows. Because, if we go too far in height we will lack at the bottom of the picture [from light gradations: light to dark]. Such as will happen to those who, when painting a picture of the night, place a burning torch or candle in the foreground. They then no longer have the possibility of giving the rest of the painting clarity. As far as he was able, Rembrandt painted the strength of candlelight in a few brown prints, but when one covers the light the rest of the work remains dark because we tend to hold our hand up to the light, so that this does not obstruct our ability to differentiate everything clearly and vividly."

"Contact with like-minded painters, a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through.. .One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot to me."

"In a nicely set up little work by Rembrandt of 'John the Baptist preaching', I can remember seeing a wonderful attention in (the faces) of the listeners, in all sorts of positions, this was really praiseworthy. But one could also see how a dog indecently jumps on a bitch. You can say that this happens and is normal, but I say this is an abominable impropriety in this story. But I want to state here that this scene belongs more to a preaching by the dog-like Diogenes than by John the Baptist.. .Pictures like this serve to illustrate the stupidity of the Master and become even more ridiculous as they drift into ever more trivial additions."

"[[w:Karel van Mander|[Karel] Van Mander]] says that a certain Jaques de Bakker in Antwerp first introduced the fleshy way of painting, by not painting only with white, but by heightening the colour/paint with a natural physicality. Certainly, his namesake Jaques de Bakker from Amsterdam followed him in this commendable observation.. ..Not to mention Rembrandt and the others Aert de Gelder in particular, Rembrandt's last pupil], who highly valued this aspect of art."

"I will not deny that I used to have a particular weakness for his [Rembrandt's] manner. But this was before I began to be aware of the infallible rules of painting. I later found myself obliged to concede my mistake and reject his art as based on nothing more than insubstantial imaginings."

"And Rembrandt, imaging the night too figuratively; in its bottom, full of darkness."

"..that the strong impasto was due to Rembrandt's slow way of painting and his habit of returning to the same passage over and over again, and that consequently the portrait commissions eventually stopped coming in."

"the great Rembrandt.. ..the first heretic in painting.. .What a shame for the sake of art.. ..that so able a hand made no better use of his inborn gifts. But ah! The nobler the man, the wilder he'll become if he fails to tie himself to a rein of rule."

"Sometimes I was so saddened by my master's [Rembrandt] hard instructions that I would not eat or drink and slake my thirst with my tears.."