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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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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
Tell
Nature
Truth
Whole
Exaggeration
Lenses
Instruments
Photography

More quotes by 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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Aerial perspective has nothing to do with line, but concerns tones and colours, by the delicate manipulation of which an artist can suggest infinite distance.
Walter J. Phillips
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Many of the old masters of watercolour painted from notes, with enthusiasm either unabated or renewed. It is hard to assume the same degree of concentration in the studio, but not impossible.
Walter J. Phillips
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A horizontal or vertical line lacks energy, compared with one that deviates from either. The difference between these graphic expressions is the difference between movement and repose.
Walter J. Phillips
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Be content with nothing less than perfection.
Walter J. Phillips
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In large studio paintings... composition, or arrangement, may be better studied, and nearer perfection, washes may be more suavely graded.
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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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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Drawing is the representation of form - the graphic expression of a visual experience.
Walter J. Phillips
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The portrait painter... If he insults his sitters his occupation is gone. Whether he paints the should instead of the features, or the latter with all its natural blemishes, he is as presumptuous as if he shouted, 'What a face. Hide it.' which would never do, although it is analogous to what landscape painters are doing every day.
Walter J. Phillips
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Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.
Walter J. Phillips
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Many rules for the creation of colour schemes have been published in recent years, but, while they are popular in commercial studies, I know of no creative artist who employs them. They are, per se, restrictive their use precludes any chance of adventuring in this interesting field.
Walter J. Phillips
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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
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The sincere artist is usually his own best critic, but continuous and prolonged work on one painting will sometimes dull his judgment... The critic is in demand, but he must be competent.
Walter J. Phillips
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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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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.
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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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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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 sincerity and over-anxiety can spoil a picture, through superfluous elaboration and unnecessary correction, the carelessness that would leave it in an unfinished state is even more reprehensible.
Walter J. Phillips