The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries. — James Elkins Copy Share Image
As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to. — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods. — James Elkins Copy Share Image
To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up,… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids... mixed… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been… — James Elkins Copy Share
Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the… — James Elkins Copy Share
Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the… — James Elkins Copy Share
A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow… — James Elkins Copy Share
At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colours of the rainbow. If the violin came… — James Elkins Copy Share
The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally… — James Elkins Copy Share
It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking… — James Elkins Copy Share
Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a… — James Elkins Copy Share
Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand. — James Elkins Copy Share
I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss… — James Elkins Copy Share
If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly… — James Elkins Copy Share
The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset... looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high in the… — James Elkins Copy Share
To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating,… — James Elkins Copy Share
