John French Sloan
John French Sloan
John French Sloanwas a twentieth-century painter and etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known for his urban genre scenes and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often observed through his Chelsea studio window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth2 August 1871
CountryUnited States of America
Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive.
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.
Line is the most powerful device of drawing.
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.
A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.
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.