Nelson Shanks Quotes

#1. There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I need to be fairly straightforward. I'll just try to paint the man, his intelligence, his amiability and his stature, maybe paint him fairly close to humor and try to get it just right.

Nelson Shanks

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

Nelson Shanks

#3. If I am using a sable, it may start off as an eight or seven, but it's a double aught by the time I'm done. I hate brights ... they have no use. You might as well buy a filbert and take the scissors and cut off half of what you paid for.

Nelson Shanks

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

Nelson Shanks

#5. 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.

Nelson Shanks

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

Nelson Shanks

#7. 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.

Nelson Shanks

#8. I try to think and design in color.

Nelson Shanks

#9. I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

Nelson Shanks

#10. 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.

Nelson Shanks

#11. So really what I am trying to do is create and understand form. But then too, color enters into it because a lot of things are color changes without a value change, which wouldn't show up if you were just using a non-color medium.

Nelson Shanks

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

Nelson Shanks

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

Nelson Shanks

#14. My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

Nelson Shanks

#15. If you really want to seriously think about life, and therefore take painting very seriously ... and take seriously the joys that it can bring to one, then you want to go to museums. You want to study the great of the past ...

Nelson Shanks

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

Nelson Shanks