Carolyn > Carolyn's Quotes

“All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.”
― John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing

“I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.”
― Beatrix Potter

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.”
― Walt Stanchfield

“I’ve got a flesh-colored tattoo. I drew it myself. You should see it sometime, if only you could see it (it’s invisible).”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

“It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.”
― Victoria Kahler, Their Friend Scarlet

“I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right.”
― Alan Lee

“practice makes better”
― Brian Lies

“Writing and drawing are very therapeutic, but they are also an excellent manifestation tool. I teach my clients to draw what they want, or to write a story about it to bring the manifestation forward into the present.”
― Alice McCall, Wellness Wisdom - Inspired by One Woman's Journey with Breast Cancer

“Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory.”
― David Gentleman, London You're Beautiful

“This is a familiar syndrome. There is a stage with every drawing or painting when it looks banal and clumsy. It's worth pushing through that, working through the cliché to find out what made it a cliché in the first place.”
― Antony Sher, Year Of The King

“Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”
― Lauren DeStefano, Sever

“I believe that most of us, students and artists alike, ought to concern ourselves less with what we think is the right way to draw and more with letting our feelings flow through our hand. In this way, we stretch our dynamic nature. Our larger goal should be to draw in a way that expresses our vision.”
― Bert Dodson, Keys to Drawing

“You'll see: if you acquire a taste for drawing, you won't be able to do without it, just like me. Hokusai (The Old Man Mad About Drawing)”
― Françoise Place

“There are enough ideas, images, symbols, and experiences in your head already to work with for a lifetime. It's a little like having a car with an unpredictable battery, though. Sometimes you get in and it starts right up. Other times, especially if it has been sitting idle for awhile, you turn the key and nothing happens.”
― Bert Dodson, Keys to Drawing

“I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life. - from Hokusai’s ‘The Art Crazy Old Man”
― Hokusai Katsushika

“It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.”
― Lou Holtz