David Cobley Quotes

#1. Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.

David Cobley

#2. Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.

Francine Prose

#3. If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man.

G.K. Chesterton

#4. When you are making the one you are doing, you think it is the greatest film going. And then you do another one and it is a great film.

Nick Nolte

#5. Death is not a stalker, always looking for us. Death is a scorekeeper tallying up how much we love life and how much we are willing to work for it. We die when we stop living.

Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz

#6. All of us take an interest, to a greater or lesser extent, in what people around us look like, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.

David Cobley

#7. Sometimes, in a portrait, I go straight in with paint onto canvas ... Other than riding my bike up and down the hills around here, it is the most dangerous thing I do ... like tightrope-walking without a safety net!

David Cobley

#8. People fascinate me. Consciously or unconsciously, I have been studying their behavior all my life.

David Cobley

#9. The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words, so that I can talk to him?

Zhuangzi

#10. As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits ... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them ... It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still.

David Cobley