Walter J. Phillips Quotes
The importance of colour is as nothing compared with that of form, chiaroscuro and arrangement. They are the true and enduring bases of pictorial art.
Rhythm is as necessary in a picture as pigment; it is as much a part of painting as of music.
Style is instinctive and few achieve it in a notable degree. Its development is not hastened by instruction. It comes or it doesn't. It will take care of itself.
Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.
Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.
It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.
Do not think me fussy when I specify tidiness. It is essential... In printing, remember that cleanliness and order wait upon success.
Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.
The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.
It is evident that no derivative laws can teach the young student to see and apprehend colour in nature. His perception needs development as urgently as his muscles.
It is the incompetent and the neglected artist who charges the public with ignorance, stupidity, and indifference. He raves loudly, but he is incomprehensible, even inarticulate, in his work.
There must be a judicious arrangement of all the parts. Considered conversely, the artist's task is to fill his panel with a design that conforms to its shape and is beautiful in itself.
There is the process of enlarging a watercolour, which actually amounts to copying its good points and improving its bad ones, and is interesting proportionately as the latter increase.
Submit your work to interested societies for exhibition where the critics in the light of their physical well-being and according to the extent of their knowledge, may appraise them conveniently.
The true artist and the sane collector never will tolerate insincerity and impudence.
The character of the subject must influence the choice of the method of its representation.
Drawing is the representation of form - the graphic expression of a visual experience.
The sincere artist is usually his own best critic, but continuous and prolonged work on one painting will sometimes dull his judgment... The critic is in demand, but he must be competent.
Many of the old masters of watercolour painted from notes, with enthusiasm either unabated or renewed. It is hard to assume the same degree of concentration in the studio, but not impossible.
Any subject is suitable provided it is of sufficient interest, but the design must be very carefully considered, and plenty of time and thought given to its construction.
Aerial perspective has nothing to do with line, but concerns tones and colours, by the delicate manipulation of which an artist can suggest infinite distance.
A horizontal or vertical line lacks energy, compared with one that deviates from either. The difference between these graphic expressions is the difference between movement and repose.
However exquisite the contours or the colours of clouds, trees, rivers or hills, may be in themselves, they must be sacrificed if they do not conform with the general plan.
A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.
Beauty may be perceived in any scene by one with sympathy and understanding. Beauty is in the mind.
Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.
Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.
A painter may be an abandoned mimic; at school he copies his teachers, which is only right, but he copies in turn every artist in town, which is not. He may do you that honour.
Many a painter has lived in affluence, in high esteem, who lacked the divine spark, and who is utterly forgotten to-day.
Realism is condemned by those artists whose poverty of technique does not permit them to express it.
For an intelligent estimate of your technique go to another artist working in the same medium.
The most interesting studio work, and perhaps the most practicable, is painting from pencil sketches and notes... It ensures the elimination of all facts but those essential to the effect.
While it is emotion that gives an impulse to the landscape painter, it is his style that inspires the critic's praise, and his subject that inveigles the untutored beholder.
Etching will suggest subtle variations of tone, the most delicate shadings, all with black lines, which, as far as lines go, are unsurpassed for sheer beauty.
I don't like to think that I am a slave to technique, or so inept that I have to restrict myself to one method.
The deserving are not always blest. That peculiar attribute known as personality is as potent a factor as genius.
In painting, whether colour reflection is apparent or not, every hue must echo neighbouring hues, so that homogeneity may be attained.
The most admirable method is that by which each wash of colour, large or small, is never disturbed. It admits of practically no overpainting, sponging or scrubbing. The colour stays where it is put.
Humility counts for much, but it may be that vanity does not dispossess that admirable quality.
Let it not be assumed that the artist is so smug as to dislike true criticism. No sincere artist was ever completely satisfied with his labour.
A mistake in drawing becomes difficult to detect when the eye is familiar with it.
The syllogism art for art's sake refers to that kind of painting which disregards, or is contrary to, public taste.
The artist reserves the right to remove a blot on the landscape, to change positions of things, to suit his composition, providing only that he does not transgress the laws of probability.
In large studio paintings... composition, or arrangement, may be better studied, and nearer perfection, washes may be more suavely graded.
