Atmosphere Quote by James Elkins

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

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

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

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

— James Elkins

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

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

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

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

Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.

— 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, and toss…

— James Elkins

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

— James Elkins

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