Nelson Shanks Quotes

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

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

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

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

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

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

I try to think and design in color.

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

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

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