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Quotes about Technique


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82 art quotes about Technique found | Share this page of quotes about Technique on Facebook

Every technique brings up a different kind of demand on the use of the element. (Anni Albers)

Technique! The very word is like a shriek of outraged Art. It is the idiot name given to effort by those who are too weak, too weary, or too dull to play the game. The mighty have no theory of technique. (Leonard Bacon)

When your technique and your ideas support each other and the image becomes the vehicle of that expression, then you will have found your voice or niche. (Henry Bateman)

- from Address to the Comtemporary Club of Philadelphia shortly after Sargent's Death, 1926...
A perfect technique in anything only means that there has been no break in continuity between conception, or thought, and the act of performance. (Cecilia Beaux)

Technique isn't enough on its own – emotion has to come through – but when you've got the technique sewn up, that's one thing you don't have to worry about. (Zoe Benbow)

The beginning painter is focused on learning technique with the goal of accuracy. Then comes the realization that composition and design are more important. (Robert Bissett)

Learn technique; have full command to the extent of not being conscious of how it is done. When craftsmanship has been developed, you are free to create... technique will give way to expression! (Sergei Bongart)

There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture. (Georges Braque)

Consider diversity of techniques within your paintings. Pick and choose your areas and then go with gusto... or refinement. (Harley Brown)

The only craft and technique you have legitimate access to is the craft and technique you forgot, that has dissolved itself into the unconscious... Because you have learned it so well you have forgotten it. (Robert Olen Butler)

Focusing totally on technique, you lose the essence and power of simplicity... The other extreme is just as bad; you see it in a lot of Modern works, where the concept is more important than the technique, resulting in very poor craftsmanship. (George L. Carlson)

Art is a thing so much of the imagination, of the soul, that it is difficult to descend to the fundamentals of technique and yet make it plain to the student that these are but the 'means' and not an end in themselves. (John F. Carlson)

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. (Pablo Casals)

Technique should be entirely subordinate to the demands of your emotions. (Alvaro Castagnet)

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas. (Raymond Chandler)

The artist can know all the technique in the world, but if he feels nothing, it will mean nothing. (Chen Chi)

Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe again and can take off on your own. (Julia Child)

Technique is not the most important part of making art. It is the 'why' of the painting - the idea, the concept, and message being conveyed - that gives an artwork its life and purpose. (Kathleen Cook)

And I can just see that sometimes the technique is blasting powder rather than steady struggle. (Richard Diebenkorn)

Learn your technique thoroughly, immerse yourself in it, and then just throw it all out the window, and express what you feel... and it will come through that you are a technician. (William Dobell)

The human binocular and flickering vision, coupled with the precious imperfection of the human hand is where art lives - there are no shortcuts. (Dean Taylor Drewyer)

Use of the confusion technique has many times effected exceedingly rapid hypnotic inductions under conditions such as acute pain and even in hostile, aggressive and resistant persons. (Milton H. Erickson)

Technique minus soul equals zero. You might as well paint a broom as a person. (Max Ferguson)

One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute. (Helen Frankenthaler)

The fun of painting is technique: loose opposite tight, texture versus wash, light against dark. (Joe Garcia)

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easily if you think of something besides technique. (Paul Gauguin)

Then I squeezed roots and trunks into it from the tube, and modelled them a little with the brush. Yes, now they stand in it - shoot up out of it - stand firmly rooted in it. (Vincent van Gogh)

It liberates me not being encumbered by technical proficiency. (Alexander Gorlizki)

I want to paint as though my technique were invisible. I want my effort to be in the form and texture created by light, not brushstrokes. (Bill Harvey)

The finished painting is a combination of techniques; however, impasto is achieved through light strokes of paint with no additives. (William Hook)

Technique is only a vehicle. (Callum Innes)

Once you have really 'heard' what the artist has expressed, it is simple – and fascinating – to work back, step by step, through the technique. Thus one may share in the task of creation. (Edward Alden Jewell)

Are those who use Computer Graphics techniques any less competent or skillful? Academic discussions aside, if you like it or it evokes something within you, that is what is important. (Julie Rodriguez Jones)

Technical achievement without vision is only craft. (Carole Katchen)

First one specializes in technique until he comes to the end of technique and bases everything on the heart itself – this is the best way of practice. (Trevor Leggett)

Our painting should be more than an exercise in technique, it should be a means to an end – the end being what we want to express using the subject. (Tom Lynch)

People often think that technical perfection has something to do with fine painting... Rembrandt, whose technique fascinated all great masters after a time, was said to have painted with a tarbrush. So he was not exactly a fine painter. (Cornelis Le Mair)

Everywhere there is craft and technique; everywhere there is artistry and form. Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of its awkwardness it obstructs that inner element... (Kasimir Malevich)

I'm so worried that I'm going to perfect technique someday. I have to say it's unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend upon some technical error. (Sally Mann)

When you're using a long brush, you have your arm at full length. Basically, it exaggerates the movement of your body. But I always start far away and end up really close. (Brice Marden)

Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious. (Rollo May)

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes. (Marshall McLuhan)

I don't want to be a one trick pony. (Janice Mills)

Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive. (Claude Monet)

I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about. (Claude Monet)

One mustn't let technique be the consciously important thing. It should be at the service of expressing the form. (Henry Moore)

The painterly painter avoids the how-to approach, suspicious as ever, that technique will obscure his or her vision. (Charles Movalli)

My technique, starting with a quick outline in pencil, is designed to record first impressions, with no time for second thoughts. (John Newberry)

I try not to handle the foreign subjects with my English techniques and preconceptions, but to paint Sydney in Sydney and Tangier in Tangier. (John Newberry)

Committing oneself to a technique causes stagnation. (Kimon Nicolaides)

Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration. (Rudolf Nureyev)

Don't show me the technique. Don't show me that what you are doing is difficult. (Pierre Parisien)

I regard technique as merely a means to an end. (Randy Penner)

I have a technique where I drag thin strands of gold and silver paint across the foreground to indicate reeds and grasses. Sometimes I will deliberately smudge the strands to indicate thicker blades of grass or to imply movement. (Deborah Phillips)

For an intelligent estimate of your technique go to another artist working in the same medium. (Walter J. Phillips)

When technique is obtrusive it becomes mere mannerism, a conscious striving for effect. It is only a means to an end – the manner of putting paint to paper. It hardly embraces the expressive side of painting. (Walter J. Phillips)

You can't learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result. (Jackson Pollock)

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. (Jackson Pollock)

Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value. (Ezra Pound)

-The War of Art
The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come. (Steven Pressfield)

- interview with Shirley Kaneda, 1994...
I never know quite how to draw distinctions between letting go and having control. It seems to me that one would only let go when one has control. Otherwise it's a mess. (Fiona Rae)

All the technique in the business won't guarantee you success as an artist, any more than painstakingly learning every tennis stroke will get you to Wimbledon. You can only be sure you won't get there without them. (Ron Ranson)

There are people who can't stand the pain. What happens is they begin to develop some kind of technique to keep out of that hole. Once they do that, they're finished. They never go any further. They're done. (Milton Resnick)

I have never wanted to paint thickly - paint tubes are much too expensive. But one way or another, the painting has to be done. When I learn how to paint better, I will paint less thickly. (Jean-Paul Riopelle)

The more I paint, the more I appreciate that art reflects one's own life – that technique is not nearly as important as awareness and meaning and feeling. (Anne Adams Robertson Massie)

If we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy... (Auguste Rodin)

People say I use my billboard technique to make art. Baloney! I used my art technique to paint billboards. (James Rosenquist)

It takes a long time to become loose without losing it. (Sandy Sandy)

The Japanese technique of woodblock painting is a painstaking process. There is no instant gratification because it takes up to two to three months just to get an image. (Graham Scholes)

Theories, methods and formulas aid in the making of art, but each artist's technique comes more from his or her personality than anything else. (Randall Sexton)

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses. (Nelson Shanks)

Find your own technique. (John Sloan)

The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means. (John Sloan)

When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters. (Joaquin Sorolla)

Our photography, in the way that we abuse the surface, or at least use the surface - introduce it and not be afraid of it - I think is somewhat modern. We're not trying to make something look beautiful and old at all, we're trying to show that photography is an object, and we can't deny that some of these things look old. (Doug and Mike Starn)

It is helpful to consider any technique that stimulates 'abstract thinking' because these help the brain fully absorb and appreciate, and this may lead to greater creativity. (Ken Strong)

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious. (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki)

There are many things one thinks about in a painting. Often, it's how to handle your chosen medium and how to best reveal the light in a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. (Janice Tanton)

No matter what techniques I use, I still want to go after the eternal, meaningful aspects of painting. (Dan Thompson)

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it. (Leon Trotsky)

The expressive techniques of painting are capable of conveying an analogy but not an impossible photograph of a moment. (Edouard Vuillard)

To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me. (Andrew Wyeth)