John French Sloan Quotations

Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive.

Most art students are generous till it comes to squeezing their colour on the palette... Many pictures haven't become works of art simply because the artist tried to save a nickel's worth of colour.

Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.

In the work of Seurat, you can see the dots of neutral colors carrying the form and then the dots of more intense color that make the color texture. It is a totally different principle that than of the Impressionists who used broken color to imitate visual effect.

Have a special interest, a positive prejudice about some clump of trees or one particular knoll, an excitement about them can spread through the whole composition, and so fire the rest of the things that you are only mildly interested in.

Sets of lines can say something about the direction and nature of the light. They are used by great fresco painters as a sign for shade.

I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.

Line is the most powerful device of drawing.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

Draw with the brush. Carve the form. Don't be carried away by subtleties of modeling and nice pigmentation at the expense of losing the form.

Atmosphere in a painting is nine-tenths fear.

The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.

Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

Think of drawing as a way of talking about the things that interest you. Think of those wonderful documents, drawings made on scraps of paper by the lesser Dutch masters while they were wandering around market places and sitting in saloons.

In the hands of a master, light and shade is one of the great qualities of art.

Don't be stingy with your paint, it isn't worth it.

The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and color are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows...Color is surface skin that fits over the form.

A piece of drapery is like a necktie, hot stuff to paint, and one of the easiest things for a painter to kid himself into thinking he can do. Don't be fooled by the color. Go after the shape and character. Hew the forms together with colored tones.

The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.

Study the great brush drawings of the Chinese and Japanese... When we try to imitate their conventions for perspective, form and texture we lose the content, because those artists were part of an ancient tradition. Our tradition changes rapidly, our schools of thought come to fruition quickly and decay again. We see differently.

Find your own technique.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

When painting a landscape it is desirable to walk through the clumps and around the bushes, around the trees, the houses and the rocks. Familiarizing yourself in this way with the subject, you will get a better concept of the thing and not a visual and false snapshot.

The artist does not see both eyes alike. There is always 'the eye' and the other eye... It adds life and plasticity to the drawing if the eye in the light is darker than the one in the shadow. It gives the head vividness.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.

Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.

The artist seeks to record his awareness of order in life.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.

Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.

Draw places you have seen from memory. I used to paint things I had glimpsed through windows while riding in the elevated train.

Be sensitive to the qualities inherent in the medium. Paint honestly and avoid tricks.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

...in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it.

Don't think of sea as color. Make it a solid that can support a boat. Think of 'wetness' as color-texture.

Always think of drawing, getting the forms realized, emphasizing the design.

You can be a giant among artists without ever attaining any great skill. Facility is a dangerous thing. When there is too much technical ease the brain stops criticizing. Don't let the hand fall into a smart way of putting the mind to sleep.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.

Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

Form your own color concept of things in nature. I have no rules for fine color to give you.

Originality is a quality that cannot be imitated. The technique of the language, on the other hand, is something that belongs to all who can understand it.

Art is the response of the living to life. It is therefore the record left behind by civilization.

When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.