John Sloan Quotes

#1. There is only one thing left for you to do," John Sloan advised one artist. "Pull off your socks and try with your feet.

Ross Wetzsteon

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

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#5. Drawing and composition are the same thing.

John French Sloan

#6. 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.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#8. 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.

John French Sloan

#9. Keep striving and searching for greater realization. Through that yearning the problems of execution will be solved.

John Sloan

#10. I wasn't going to let Jerry Sloan embarrass me, because basketball had a proper role in my life. I suspected my basketball philosophy wasn't the bottom line anyway.

John Amaechi

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

John French Sloan

#12. Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

John French Sloan

#13. The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

John French Sloan

#14. A piece of drapery is like a necktie, hot stuff to paint, and one of the easiest things for a painter to kid himself into thinking he can do. Don't be fooled by the color. Go after the shape and character. Hew the forms together with colored tones.

John French Sloan

#15. 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.

John French Sloan

#16. 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.

John French Sloan

#17. What difference does it make whether your work is appreciated or not? The work will still be yours. Anyway, most of us are only appreciated after we are dead.

John Sloan

#18. Don't be stingy with your paint, it isn't worth it.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#20. The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#22. Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living.

John Sloan

#23. 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.

John French Sloan

#24. Find your own technique.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#27. Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.

John Sloan

#28. You can be a giant among artists without ever attaining any great skill. Facility is a dangerous thing. When there is too much technical ease the brain stops criticizing. Don't let the hand fall into a smart way of putting the mind to sleep.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#30. 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.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#32. Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.

John French Sloan

#33. 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.

John French Sloan

#34. For me to be here tonight, everything had to be perfect. I had to get drafted by Utah, had to play with a point guard like John Stockton, and had to be coached by Jerry Sloan and Frank Layden.

Karl Malone

#35. Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

John French Sloan

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

John French Sloan

#37. Cops and schoolteachers," Sloan said with satisfaction. "A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.

John Sandford