Artist Quotes by James Elkins

It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.

— James Elkins

To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils…

— James Elkins

I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists,…

— James Elkins

In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a…

— James Elkins

A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by…

— James Elkins

Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.

— James Elkins

To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when…

— James Elkins

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

The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.

— James Elkins

Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint…

— James Elkins

What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking…

— James Elkins

Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front…

— James Elkins

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

The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because…

— James Elkins

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

Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids... mixed…

— James Elkins

If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we…

— James Elkins

Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.

— James Elkins

Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give…

— James Elkins