James Elkins Quotes

#1. Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.

James Elkins

#2. The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally it is beyond the range of printed pictures.

James Elkins

#3. It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.

James Elkins

#4. Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.

James Elkins

#5. What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.

James Elkins

#6. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

James Elkins

#7. One of these people - a Canadian, of all things - stands at the picture's center, organizing the many smaller pictures into a coherent whole. His willingness to throw open a window on the American financial world, and to show people what it has become, still takes my breath away.

Michael Lewis

#8. Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been a mongrel among academic pursuits, borrowing whatever it needed from other fields ...

James Elkins

#9. By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death.

Paul Valery

#10. I walked back past the stable and carriage house. The path took me cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn't yet seen the spinning globe in the house that showed the rest of it.

Sue Monk Kidd

#11. Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.

James Elkins

#12. A man that does not love praise is not a full man.

Henry Ward Beecher

#13. I have OCD, which is not fun. I have to be incredibly tidy and organized or it messes with my mind and switches off on me.

Charlize Theron

#14. The moment you proclaim your Oneness with God, others will proclaim you partnership with Satan.

Neale Donald Walsch

#15. To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.

James Elkins

#16. Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer

James Elkins

#17. I don't know if there's a method that I'd like to see younger people bring back, I just want to see everyone of every age in the kitchen.

Dorie Greenspan

#18. I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments ...

James Elkins

#19. If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.

James Elkins

#20. A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of coloured slurries on the palette.

James Elkins

#21. Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.

James Elkins

#22. Never, ever, have I felt really accepted in Hollywood.

Sally Field

#23. All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not.

James Elkins

#24. A fool and his money are soon married.

Carolyn Wells

#25. Most people would guess that the sun is fifty or a hundred times brighter than the moon, but it's a half million times brighter - evidence of the amazing capacity of our eyes to adjust to light and dark.

James Elkins

#26. It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.

James Elkins

#27. In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a theorist might be, to signal how inextricably linked these existences and practices might be.

James Elkins

#28. Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

James Elkins

#29. Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors ... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids ... mixed together with powdered stones to give color ... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal.

James Elkins

#30. The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset ... looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high in the sky over the place the sun has set, and then it quickly expands and sinks until it blends with the colors underneath.

James Elkins

#31. Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.

James Elkins

#32. The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter ...

James Elkins

#33. We will be misguided in our intentions if we point at one single thing and say that it will prevent war, unless, of course, that thing happens to be the will, the determination, and the resolve of people everywhere that nations will never again clash on the battlefield.

Leslie Groves

#34. Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to ...

James Elkins

#35. As a water bead on a lotus leaf, as water on a red lily, does not adhere, so the sage does not adhere to the seen, the heard, or the sensed.

Gautama Buddha

#36. As for me, I am in pursuit of excellence. I have no time to get old.

Will Eisner

#37. The opposite of a glance ... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second.

James Elkins