Kimon Nicolaides Quotes

#1. 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

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

Kimon Nicolaides

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

Kimon Nicolaides

#4. Committing oneself to a technique causes stagnation.

Kimon Nicolaides

#5. If you stop and confine yourself to one place, you will develop prejudices.

Guo Xiang

#6. 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

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

Kimon Nicolaides

#8. Yet in two ways may a man come with evil tidings. He may be a worker of evil; or he may be such as leaves well alone, and comes only to bring aid in time of need.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#9. 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

#10. When you are one of several, then you have lost your freedom; you cannot send for your traveling boots whenever you wish, you cannot move aimlessly about in the world. ~ Either/Or

Soren Kierkegaard

#11. Never waste an unsaid word of praise and never praise the said words of anger.

Terry Blakeman

#12. True hope is cleareyed. It sees all the difficulties that exist and all the potential for failure, but through that carves a realistic path to a better future.

Jerome Groopman

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

Kimon Nicolaides

#14. 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

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

Kimon Nicolaides

#16. I think the gay - the gay/straight alliances in the school are very useful as far as creating understanding among kids and so kids aren't necessarily so stigmatized or demonized for being who they really are.

Jeanne Phillips

#17. 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

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

Kimon Nicolaides

#19. all knew that other people were at work elsewhere, spreading the message far more effectively,

Gilly Macmillan

#20. If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.

Elizabeth Warren

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

Kimon Nicolaides

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

Kimon Nicolaides

#23. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.

Leon Panetta

#24. 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