Art Books Quotes

“The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social harmony, and that regenerative stream of life sustained upon the earth itself as it spins through the cosmos to the music of the spheres.”
― Luther E. Vann, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

“The puzzled life was on Earth, still—a burdened lizard!”
― Nithin Purple, The Bell Ringing Woman: A Blue Bell of Inspiration

“The swift wings of years passed in hurry;and it’s a pallid thought to believe those all are past-the boyhood pleasance,the very tender smiles,the fine soft delicate sense.”
― Nithin Purple, Venus and Crepuscule

“Ha! the quaint,mystic smiles of night are well, unlocked;for the odd fancier to please by her calmness,and that halcyon state of musing, keenly touched me,it has all of mind’s solid, restful access.”
― Nithin Purple, Venus and Crepuscule

“There are several books on Walter Potter---one is called Sweet Death: A Feast With Kittens; another, The Victorian Visionary: Inventor of Kitsch. There are some on carnivals, fairgrounds, prison murals, prison art, and a hefty book with a title in gold, Portraits of Icons: From Alexamenos Graffito to Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper. There are also books I have seen before, books I used to, until very recently when I lost my suitcase, own. One is a book on the abstract expressionist Bernice Bing; colors from her piece Burney Falls cascade down the spine---deep red, tinged with orange, outlined in black against white, brown and peach like skin. There's a book on the performance artist Senga Nengudi too, and another on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil. I take this last one off the shelf, and it falls open to a middle page, which has a picture of her painting Three Girls on it. I stand there for a moment, looking at the three girls' faces: calm, patiently waiting. They are huddled close together, as though perhaps they are sisters, but I don't think they could be; they look too different.
I had a postcard of this painting taped to my wall while I was growing up. It was blank on the other side, but I kept it because I had found it tucked in the wooden frame of one of Dad's paintings. It went missing at some point, but while I had it, I looked at it often and felt that I knew---like really knew, as though I had a sense about these things---that the girls depicted were vampires, and that they were still out there in the world, looking exactly the same as when Sher-Gil painted them in 1935, and that I would one day meet them. The painting, I decided when I was a child, depicted the three girls quietly waiting for three brothers to come out of a house so that they could eat them.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating