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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

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James Elkins
Hands
Gives
Texture
Thought
Color
Painter
Antenna
Giving
Fine
Trees
Faintest
Things
Movement
Lovely
Finely
Tree
Paint
Tuned
Hand
Merely
Unnoticed
Faces
Shadow
Reacting
Art
Painting
Fixing

More quotes by James Elkins

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Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.
James Elkins
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.
James Elkins
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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.
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Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.
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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.
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It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.
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Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.
James Elkins
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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