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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

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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
Hands
Behind
Master
Retain
Cannot
Rest
Fail
Facility
Certain
Hand
Degrees
Gained
Without
Successful
Expect
Advance
Hard
Practice
Worked
Painter
Must
Forget
Masters
Degree
Every
Eye
Failing
Drawing
Fall
Behinds
Deny

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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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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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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A mistake in drawing becomes difficult to detect when the eye is familiar with it.
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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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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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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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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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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The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.
Walter J. Phillips
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A landscape painting is essentially emotional in origin. It exists as a record of an effect in nature whose splendour has moved a human heart, and according as it is well or ill done it moves the hearts of others.
Walter J. Phillips
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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
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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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Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
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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The character of the subject must influence the choice of the method of its representation.
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
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In most natural scenes there is a prevailing colour, which the landscape painter must learn to identify, and which must prevail also in a slightly exaggerated form, in his painting, for the sake of truth, harmony and unity.
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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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