John French Sloan Quotes

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

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.

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

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

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

Find your own technique.

Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

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

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

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.

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

The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and color are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows ... Color is surface skin that fits over the form.

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

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

The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.

When painting a landscape it is desirable to walk through the clumps and around the bushes, around the trees, the houses and the rocks. Familiarizing yourself in this way with the subject, you will get a better concept of the thing and not a visual and false snapshot.

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

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

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

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.