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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
Others
Shame
Incompetent
Shows
Failure
Conceit
Better
Worst
Spoiled
Find
Ways
Thoroughly
Sometimes
Possible
Utterly
Even
Show
Chief
Way
Use
Chiefs
Mortify
Keep
Drawing
Drawings

More quotes by Walter J. Phillips

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The beauty and wonders of nature are as alluring as the pursuit of Art, and made of me a landscape painter.
Walter J. Phillips
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The painter who is so enamoured by the beauties of the parts of a landscape, that he strives to represent all, cannot succeed. His picture will be an arrangement of a series of portraits of things without unity... There must be variety and contrast, but in measured doses.
Walter J. Phillips
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While it is emotion that gives an impulse to the landscape painter, it is his style that inspires the critic's praise, and his subject that inveigles the untutored beholder.
Walter J. Phillips
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The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged - not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.
Walter J. Phillips
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I don't like to think that I am a slave to technique, or so inept that I have to restrict myself to one method.
Walter J. Phillips
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A painter may be an abandoned mimic at school he copies his teachers, which is only right, but he copies in turn every artist in town, which is not. He may do you that honour.
Walter J. Phillips
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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.
Walter J. Phillips
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The syllogism art for art's sake refers to that kind of painting which disregards, or is contrary to, public taste.
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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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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Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.
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
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Humility counts for much, but it may be that vanity does not dispossess that admirable quality.
Walter J. Phillips
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Be content with nothing less than perfection.
Walter J. Phillips
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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
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A mistake in drawing becomes difficult to detect when the eye is familiar with it.
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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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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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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Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist - Heaven forgive them - but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips.
Walter J. Phillips