Walter J. Phillips
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.Collection: Moving
Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.Collection: Water
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.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Style
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.Collection: Artist
Beauty may be perceived in any scene by one with sympathy and understanding. Beauty is in the mind.Collection: Beauty
Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.Collection: Persistence
The beauty and wonders of nature are as alluring as the pursuit of Art, and made of me a landscape painter.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Unique
Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.Collection: Vanity
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.Collection: Spring
Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.Collection: Color
Beauty, pleasure, and the good things of life are intensified, and perhaps only exist, by reason of contrast.Collection: Reason
It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Ambition
There is the process of enlarging a watercolour, which actually amounts to copying its good points and improving its bad ones, and is interesting proportionately as the latter increase.Collection: Interesting
Submit your work to interested societies for exhibition where the critics in the light of their physical well-being and according to the extent of their knowledge, may appraise them conveniently.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Appreciation
Humility counts for much, but it may be that vanity does not dispossess that admirable quality.Collection: Humility
Universal appreciation of art... belongs to those countries and those ages which are not, or were not, ruled by materialism. Though travel was never so easy, literature on art never so profuse, and works of art never so widely distributed, a real passion for pictures is encountered but rarely.Collection: Country
Drawing is the representation of form - the graphic expression of a visual experience.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Methodology
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Artist
Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Quality
Subject has the variety of life.Collection: Subjects
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Simplicity
Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.Collection: Photography
Since art exists for humanity it is not unreasonable to assume that humanity has some rights in the matter. Who pays the piper calls the tune. An artist cannot be at once a rebel and a comfortable citizen.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Beautiful
In large studio paintings... composition, or arrangement, may be better studied, and nearer perfection, washes may be more suavely graded.Collection: Perfection
The deserving are not always blest. That peculiar attribute known as personality is as potent a factor as genius.Collection: Personality
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.Collection: Anxiety
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.Collection: Failure
The beauties of conception are always superior to those of expression.Collection: Expression
It is often said that the modern exhibition has ruined painting. It is an unfortunate fact that it does encourage competition, so that, to attract attention to his work, an artist is tempted to descend to sensationalism, whether it is expressed by strong colour, grotesque handling, unusual subject, or sheer size.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Degrees
Any subject is suitable provided it is of sufficient interest, but the design must be very carefully considered, and plenty of time and thought given to its construction.Collection: Design
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Distance