"On the other hand, whoever wants to do human figures must have what I noticed on the corner of a Christmas number of Punch: 'Good will to all,' and that to a high degree. We must sympathize with everyone and continue to do so, otherwise our work will be cold and weak. I consider it so necessary for us to watch ourselves and to take care not to become disillusioned; and therefore it is better not to get mixed up with what I call artists' intrigues. Against such things I want on the contrary always to be on the defensive. I think of the old proverb, 'Men do not gather figs from thistles,' when I see the satisfaction people get from going round with artists. I believe it is Thomas a Kempis who says somewhere: 'I never mingle with men without feeling that I was a lesser man.' The same with me; the more I associate with painters, the weaker I feel. Only when one feels that work undertaken by oneself is too much for one person, one must cooperate and combine forces seriously. In most cases the matter ends in drinking a glass of wine together and leaving things as they were."

— Vincent Van Gogh , October 1882s

Are you drawing? Don’t waste time, try to improve your work, remember the drawings of Holbein you copied, he is the real master. Don’t strive for skillful line, strive for simplicity, for the essential lines which give the physiognomy. Rather incline towards caricature than towards pettiness.

Camille Pissaro

Everything is ordained to the definite purpose of illustrating the significance of ideas and ideals rather than the patent potency of artistic arrangements complete in themselves.

-F. F. Sherman

My artistic consciousness is just as strongly opposed to accepting any award of the State. The State is incompetent in matters of art. When it attempts to grant rewards, it encroaches upon public taste. Its intervention is completely demoralizing and disastrous to the artist whom it deceives as to his real worth. It is fatal to art itself which it imprisons in the tower of official expediency and condemns to sterile mediocrity. Prudence would dictate that it abandon this task. The day on which the State will have left us free will be the day on which it will have fulfilled its duty towards us.

Therefore, permit me, monsieur le Ministre, to decline the honor you thought to bestow upon me. I am fifty years old and I have always lived as a free man. Let me be free for the rest of my days; for when I die, let it be said of me: “He never belonged to any school, to any church, to any institution, to any academy-least of all to any regime, lest it be the regime of liberty.

-Gustave Courbet

It is the mission of the artist to give expression to the eternal elements of nature, to unfold its inner beauty. The artist tells of nature in that he makes things visible; he satisfies the forms of the human body. He shows us a greater, a simpler nature- one free of all details that have no meaning. He gives us a work that is based upon the limits of is experience, his heart, and his spirit.

When the artist creates, he borrows the elements of a representation of a world which is already in existence and in which he lives. The strongest fantasy is nourished by nature- this inexhaustible source of instruction. It is nature which stimulates our power of imagination. The deeper one has penetrated into the being of nature, the more complete is the experience which one is able to recreate. The more methods of expression one possesses, the better one succeeds in achieving pictorial communication.

One paints that what one loves; that is why one gives preference to this figure rather than to that one. One reproduces that particular landscape in which one had been happy. For the painter, an emotion is one of basic stimuli that cause him to create. He feels compelled to tell of the beauty of the landscape, or of the human figure, that is to say, of that particular small part of truth which had “moved” him so profoundly.

- Ferdinand Hodler

When You begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on your guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly. Certainly, painting has its conventions, and it is essential to reckon with them. Indeed, you can’t do anything else. And so you always ought to keep an eye on real life.

I’m no pessimist. I don’t loathe art, because I couldn’t live without devoting all my time to it. I love it as the only end of my life. Everything I do connected with it gives me intense pleasure. But still, I don’t see why the whole world should be taken up with art, demand its credentials, and on that subject give free rein to its own stupidity. Museums are just a lot of lies, and people who make art their business are mostly imposters. I can’t understand why revolutionary countries should have more prejudices about art than out of date countries! We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. We have been tied up to a fiction, instead of trying to sense what inner life there was in the men who painted them…..

-Pablo Picasso