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Some drawings are better than others... Some are utterly spoiled... I keep them all. I find a use sometimes even for the worst drawing... But their chief use is to mortify one's conceit, to show how thoroughly incompetent it is possible to be, and to shame one into better ways.

Walter J. Phillips

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Walter J. Phillips
Age: 78 †
Born: 1884
Born: October 25
Died: 1963
Died: July 5
Painter
Wood Carver
Barton-upon-Humber
Lincolnshire
Walter Joseph Phillips
Walter Phillips
Phillips
Even
Show
Chief
Way
Use
Chiefs
Mortify
Keep
Drawing
Drawings
Others
Shame
Incompetent
Shows
Failure
Conceit
Better
Worst
Spoiled
Find
Ways
Thoroughly
Sometimes
Possible
Utterly

More quotes by Walter J. Phillips

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It is the sense of unfamiliar envelopment that is impressive, whether in the living grays of hoarfrost, the crimson of the heavens at sunset, or the golden suffusions of autumn.
Walter J. Phillips
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The most interesting studio work, and perhaps the most practicable, is painting from pencil sketches and notes... It ensures the elimination of all facts but those essential to the effect.
Walter J. Phillips
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The artist reserves the right to remove a blot on the landscape, to change positions of things, to suit his composition, providing only that he does not transgress the laws of probability.
Walter J. Phillips
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Since art exists for humanity it is not unreasonable to assume that humanity has some rights in the matter. Who pays the piper calls the tune. An artist cannot be at once a rebel and a comfortable citizen.
Walter J. Phillips
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Many a painter has lived in affluence, in high esteem, who lacked the divine spark, and who is utterly forgotten to-day.
Walter J. Phillips
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It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.
Walter J. Phillips
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It is the incompetent and the neglected artist who charges the public with ignorance, stupidity, and indifference. He raves loudly, but he is incomprehensible, even inarticulate, in his work.
Walter J. Phillips
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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.
Walter J. Phillips
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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.
Walter J. Phillips
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Style is instinctive and few achieve it in a notable degree. Its development is not hastened by instruction. It comes or it doesn't. It will take care of itself.
Walter J. Phillips
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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.
Walter J. Phillips
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The play of sunlight is amusement enough for a lazy man.
Walter J. Phillips
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There must be a judicious arrangement of all the parts. Considered conversely, the artist's task is to fill his panel with a design that conforms to its shape and is beautiful in itself.
Walter J. Phillips
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When spring is here the sketcher begins to look over his equipment and relishes in anticipation the soothing hours he will spend in the open, warmed by the sun, fanned by the breeze, charmed by the manifold delights of nature.
Walter J. Phillips
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Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.
Walter J. Phillips
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Do not think me fussy when I specify tidiness. It is essential... In printing, remember that cleanliness and order wait upon success.
Walter J. Phillips
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Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.
Walter J. Phillips
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Is the artist impelled by spiritual forces, by the divine afflatus, by conscious or unconscious emulation of others? Do angles whisper in the ears of the chosen few, and create for them visions of aethereal beauty? Do landscape painters of genius walk the plains of Heaven? Or is it only vanity that urges him to paint?
Walter J. Phillips
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Subject has the variety of life.
Walter J. Phillips
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Annoyance arises from the feared implication that we are copyists in subject or treatment, or both, whereas the common qualities that establish the relationship result merely from a similarity of method.
Walter J. Phillips