Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Technique
Slave
Method
Think
Thinking
Like
Inept
Restrict
Methodology

More quotes by Walter J. Phillips

Image
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
Image
The student's ambition should be to become a painter's painter, rather than a popular painter. The approbation of fellow artists based on sympathy and understanding is manifestly better than the fickle or fast homage of the greater public.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The most admirable method is that by which each wash of colour, large or small, is never disturbed. It admits of practically no overpainting, sponging or scrubbing. The colour stays where it is put.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
Let it not be assumed that the artist is so smug as to dislike true criticism. No sincere artist was ever completely satisfied with his labour.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
The play of sunlight is amusement enough for a lazy man.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
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
Image
Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty!
Walter J. Phillips
Image
Be content with nothing less than perfection.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
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
Image
The impression of wood-grain... must be considered, not only as regards texture and visibility, but for the occasional possibility of the expression of form. A soft wood, with hard annulations, such as fir, prints very dearly.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
Every successful painter has worked hard. He cannot rest after having gained a certain degree of facility in drawing, and expect to retain it. He must advance or fall behind. Without practice he will forget his eye will fail him and his hand will deny its master.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
Artists are perennially implored to consider 'the limitations of the medium.' Whoever invented this expression exaggerated the limitations of the English language. We are not concerned with what effects cannot be produced with our materials.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
Etching will suggest subtle variations of tone, the most delicate shadings, all with black lines, which, as far as lines go, are unsurpassed for sheer beauty.
Walter J. Phillips
Image
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
Image
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