Nelson Shanks

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

— Nelson Shanks

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another…

— Nelson Shanks

I try to think and design in color.

— Nelson Shanks

There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I…

— Nelson Shanks

If you really want to seriously think about life, and therefore take painting very seriously... and take seriously the joys that it…

— Nelson Shanks

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

— Nelson Shanks

I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally…

— Nelson Shanks

If I am using a sable, it may start off as an eight or seven, but it's a double aught by the…

— Nelson Shanks

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

— Nelson Shanks

If you can see it, and if you know your color, you can paint it.

— Nelson Shanks

Realism has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry.

— Nelson Shanks

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about…

— Nelson Shanks

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an…

— Nelson Shanks

Dramatic use of color, harmonious design, the interplay of light and shadow across a variety of textures, the portrayal of the figure…

— Nelson Shanks

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses.

— Nelson Shanks

We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like…

— Nelson Shanks

Photographs and reality are just night and day. In reality, the information is all there. A photograph is just kind of a…

— Nelson Shanks

So really what I am trying to do is create and understand form. But then too, color enters into it because a…

— Nelson Shanks

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

— Nelson Shanks