EXPRESSION

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.” - HENRY
WARD BEECHER. 

Every good painter paints what he is.-  JACKSON POLLOCK

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NATURE
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the
branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot
make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.  CHAGALL

Art is the increasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never
succeeding.  CHAGALL

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter
to flowers.  CLAUDE  MONET 

All great movements in art history  began with a return to nature." -KENNETH CLARK

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”
GRACE HARTIGAN

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the
feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
-  VINCENT VAN GOGH 

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ORIGINALITY
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas
if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before)
you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” ― C.S.
LEWIS, MERE CHRISTIANITY
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ATTENTION
One day a man approached Ikkyu and asked:
   "Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?"
Ikkyu took his brush and wrote: "Attention."
   "Is that all?" asked the man.
Ikkyu then wrote: “Attention. Attention.”
   "Well," said the man, "I really don't see much depth in what you have written."
Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times: "Attention. Attention. Attention."
Half-angered, the man demanded: "What does that word "Attention" mean, anyway?"
   Ikkyu gently responded, "Attention means attention".
— IKKYU, ZEN MASTER

"It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and
delve unceasingly." CLAUDE MONET 

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight
into and understanding of many things. - VINCENT VAN GOGH 

I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start
drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle. - FREDERICK FRANCK
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“…If you aim to dispense with method, learn method”
“…If you aim at facility, work hard”
“…If you aim for simplicity, master complexity”
— LU CH'AI (WANG KAI), 17th century Master of Chinese brush painting
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Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.- ROY ADZAK
Art is not 'about.' Art is.  DARBY BANNARD

“There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”– GEORGES BRAQUE

“A painting without something disturbing in it – what's that?” – GEORGES BRAQUE