Walter J Phillips Inspirational Quotes (80)

However exquisite the contours or the colours of clouds, trees, rivers or hills, may be in themselves, they must be sacrificed if they do not conform with the general plan.

A beautiful feature in the colour wood-cut, and one unique in printing, is colour gradation... Two brushes are sometimes used, one charged with more potent colour than the other. Line blocks are nearly always printed with some variation of tone, and often in colour too.

Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.

A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.

Many a painter has lived in affluence, in high esteem, who lacked the divine spark, and who is utterly forgotten to-day.

Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction.

Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.

It is remarkable how very individual technique becomes in watercolour. Every man of personality finally arrives at a method peculiarly his own, as unique as his own fingerprint.