Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand. — James Elkins Mirrors 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… — James Elkins Academic 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 Artist Copy Share Image
At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colours of the rainbow. If the… — James Elkins Colour 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 Art Copy Share Image
A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than… — James Elkins Atmosphere Copy Share Image
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 Achievement 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 Antenna Copy Share Image
The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films,… — James Elkins Brightness Copy Share Image
“In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between… — James Elkins Bookcases 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 Answers 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 Artist 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 Abstract 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 Beautiful 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 Behave Copy Share Image
Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods. — James Elkins Inarticulate 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 Artist Copy Share Image
The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries. — James Elkins Artist 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 Art Copy Share Image
In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a… — James Elkins Art Copy Share Image
Most people would guess that the sun is fifty or a hundred times brighter than the moon, but it's a half million… — James Elkins Brighter Copy Share Image
All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every… — James Elkins Freezing Copy Share Image
The opposite of a glance... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse,… — James Elkins Glances 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 Artist Copy Share Image
The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset... looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high… — James Elkins Color 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 Brushes 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 Art 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 Answers 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 Alchemy Copy Share Image
![“The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally it is beyond the range of printed pictures.” quote by James Elkins](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e1b/james-elkins-19808_brightness_the-range-in-brightness-from-the-purple_651915.jpg)
