61 Quotes by John French Sloan

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.

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

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

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.