December 2009
9 posts
When I’m painting in the north east - I hardly ever move out of the village. I hardly ever move from one spot. I find the more I know the place, the more I know the particular spot, the more I find to paint in that particular spot…I do feel the more you know something the more you can get out of it - the more it gives you …I think I am painting what I feel about scenery - bit...
What do you mean when you speak of Scotland? The grey defeats that are dead and gone behind the legends each generation savours, yet can’t live on?
Inheritance of guilt that our country has never stood where we feel she should? A nagging threat of unfinished struggle somehow forever lost in the blood?
Scotland’s a sense of change, an endless becoming for which there was never a kind of...
“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, “If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.”
“Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and...
Scotland. Whit like is it? It’s a peatbog, it’s a daurk forest, It’s a cauldron o’ lye, a saltpan or a coal mine. If you’re gey lucky it’s a bricht bere meadow or a park o’ kye. Or mibbe…it’s a field o’ stanes. It’s a tenement or a merchant’s ha’. It’s a hure hoose or a humble cot. Princes Street or Paddy’s Merkit. It’s a fistfu’ o’ fish or a pickle o’ oatmeal. It’s a queen’s banquet o’...
“You must classify the values,” Sargent wrote. “If you begin with the middle-tone and work up to the lights and down towards the darks — so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks — you avoid false accents.
I suppose what I was thinking of was what I’ve got to do is learn how to paint, and there isn’t anybody who can teach me. I’ve just got to learn it. I didn’t think there was anybody who could teach me, so I just set about copying the way things looked and trying to get the concept of reality down. Franz Kline once told about a class that he had. A lady said to him, “I...
…because the contour line is a rather arbitrary point that indicates little more than where the mass of the object is seen against the background. By contrast, the internal directional line can expose critical structural elements of the subject
- Classical Drawing Atelier - J Aristides
I’m a hundred percent serious. Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve…
I would tell you that you need to do something - I would tell you to try everything. You need to be brought back to life. Don’t even wait until tomorrow, begin again right now, begin again every moment.
- a.m. homes “this book will save your life”
Ideas do not as a rule spring fully-formed into or out of any writer’s head unless you put something in that head in the first place. You need to fill your mind and memory and both consciously and subconsciously work with all the material you have gathered to create ideas.
- Garth Nix