Kimon Nicolaides Quotes

#1. The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be
able to correct them.

Kimon Nicolaides

#2. Merely to see ... is not enough. It is necessary to have a fresh, vivid, physical contact with the object you draw through as many of the senses as possible - and especially through the sense of touch.

Kimon Nicolaides

#3. There is no such thing as starting where Cezanne left off. You have to start where he started ... at the beginning.

Kimon Nicolaides

#4. The first function of an art student is to observe, to study nature.

Kimon Nicolaides

#5. You cannot govern the creative impulse; all you can do is eliminate obstacles and smooth the way for it.

Kimon Nicolaides

#6. Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something
related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot
separate technique from expression. There is only expression.

Kimon Nicolaides

#7. To understand theory is not enough. Much practice is necessary ...

Kimon Nicolaides

#8. You should draw not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing ... Gesture has no precise edges, no forms. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space.

Kimon Nicolaides

#9. Man can make only the rules. He cannot make the laws, which are the laws of nature. It is the understanding of these laws that enables a student to draw.

Kimon Nicolaides

#10. When we use numbers we are using symbols, and it is only when we transfer them to life that they become actualities. The same is true with drawing and painting. They are to be learned, not as rules, but as actualities. Then the rules become appropriate.

Kimon Nicolaides

#11. You are not to think of painting as something separate from drawing.

Kimon Nicolaides

#12. Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see - to see correctly - and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.

Kimon Nicolaides

#13. Committing oneself to a technique causes stagnation.

Kimon Nicolaides

#14. There is only one right way to draw ... physical contact with all sorts of objects through all the senses.

Kimon Nicolaides

#15. Art should be concerned more with life than with art.

Kimon Nicolaides