“They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young enough for a painter to have learnt his business sufficiently to be marketable from the picture-dealing point of view. ( The Phantom Model )”
“In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called The Angel Standing in the Sun. Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation: And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, both free and bond, both small and great. To reinforce the note of voracious doom, he added two lines from Samuel Rogers Voyage of Columbus: The morning march that flashes to the sun; The feast of vultures when the day is done.”
“Others, faced with Turner s competitiveness were less contented. C.R. Leslie was on hand when Turner s Helvoetsluys, to start with a grey pictre, beautiful and true, but with no positive colour in any part of it , was hung next to Constable s Opening of Waterloo Bridge Leslie wrote that Constable s painting looked as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while Constable was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind Constable, looking from Waterloo to his own picture, and at last went and got his palette from the Great Room where he had been touching another picture. He then put a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, [and] went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just as Turner left it. He as been here, Said Constable, and fired a gun.”
“An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.”
“The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen.”
“People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that s always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you re free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.”
“How are his poems? He s not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.”
“The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about? -Pablo Picasso.”
“I didn t do music to live; I lived so that I could do music.”
“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”