66 Quotes by Walter J. Phillips

Be content with nothing less than perfection.

Subject has the variety of life.

The most admirable method is that by which each wash of colour, large or small, is never disturbed. It admits of practically no overpainting, sponging or scrubbing. The colour stays where it is put.

Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.

There is the process of enlarging a watercolour, which actually amounts to copying its good points and improving its bad ones, and is interesting proportionately as the latter increase.

The true artist and the sane collector never will tolerate insincerity and impudence.

Aerial perspective has nothing to do with line, but concerns tones and colours, by the delicate manipulation of which an artist can suggest infinite distance.

Artists are perennially implored to consider ‘the limitations of the medium.’ Whoever invented this expression exaggerated the limitations of the English language. We are not concerned with what effects cannot be produced with our materials.

A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.