John French Quotes

Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.

When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

Art is the response of the living to life. It is therefore the record left behind by civilization.

The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

Originality is a quality that cannot be imitated. The technique of the language, on the other hand, is something that belongs to all who can understand it.

Line is the most powerful device of drawing.

Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.

Form your own color concept of things in nature. I have no rules for fine color to give you.

Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.

In the hands of a master, light and shade is one of the great qualities of art.

Sets of lines can say something about the direction and nature of the light. They are used by great fresco painters as a sign for shade.

Don't be stingy with your paint, it isn't worth it.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive.

...in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it.

The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

Draw with the brush. Carve the form. Don't be carried away by subtleties of modeling and nice pigmentation at the expense of losing the form.

Be sensitive to the qualities inherent in the medium. Paint honestly and avoid tricks.

Find your own technique.

Always think of drawing, getting the forms realized, emphasizing the design.

Atmosphere in a painting is nine-tenths fear.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

Most art students are generous till it comes to squeezing their colour on the palette... Many pictures haven't become works of art simply because the artist tried to save a nickel's worth of colour.

A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.

Draw places you have seen from memory. I used to paint things I had glimpsed through windows while riding in the elevated train.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

The artist seeks to record his awareness of order in life.

Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

Don't think of sea as color. Make it a solid that can support a boat. Think of 'wetness' as color-texture.

To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.

But they are many and he is alone.This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet.