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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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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
Side
Embrace
Expressive
Sides
Paint
Striving
Means
Mere
Hardly
Ends
Conscious
Manner
Mean
Paper
Technique
Effects
Strive
Mannerism
Painting
Putting
Mannerisms
Becomes
Effect
Embraces

More quotes by 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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It is evident that no derivative laws can teach the young student to see and apprehend colour in nature. His perception needs development as urgently as his muscles.
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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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
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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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The importance of colour is as nothing compared with that of form, chiaroscuro and arrangement. They are the true and enduring bases of pictorial art.
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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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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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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Appreciation is the breath of life to the creative artist, and in spite of modern conditions, there is enough abroad to sustain him. But his name is now legion he competes with the dead as well as the living and the rewards and honours seem attenuated by division.
Walter J. Phillips
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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
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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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Drawing is the representation of form - the graphic expression of a visual experience.
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 character of the subject must influence the choice of the method of its representation.
Walter J. Phillips
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Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult - so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily.
Walter J. Phillips
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The beauties of conception are always superior to those of expression.
Walter J. Phillips
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Perhaps the ideal life is that of the week-end artist, who preserves the integrity of his own aesthetic ideals because of his economic independence... If his daily grind is hateful he has his weekly solace in art.
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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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