James Elkins Quotes

• Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.

  James Elkins

  Artist, Color, Painting

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• La pintura registra el gesto más delicado y el más tenso. Dice si el pintor estaba sentado o de pie o agachado ante el lienzo. La pintura es un calco de los movimientos del pintor, un retrato de su cuerpo y sus pensamientos.

  James Elkins

  Portraits, Records, Movement

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been a mongrel among academic pursuits, borrowing whatever it needed from other fields.

  James Elkins

  Art, Long, Criticism

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• Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.

  James Elkins

  Art, Hands, Color

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.193, Routledge

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• As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

  James Elkins

  Oil, Doe, Stories

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Ver es metamorfosis, no mecanismo.

  James Elkins

  Metamorphosis, Seeing, Mechanism

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• Lo contrario de una mirada... es un atisbo: porque en una mirada, vemos sólo durante un segundo, y en un atisbo, el objeto se muestra sólo durante un segundo.

  James Elkins

  Opposites, Glimpse, Glances

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• In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a theorist might be, to signal how inextricably linked these existences and practices might be.

  James Elkins

  Artist, Practice, Want

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• All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not.

  James Elkins

  Hurt, Thinking, Littles

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• Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.

  James Elkins

  Mirrors, Substance

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.45, Routledge

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• To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when a painting's finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place.

  James Elkins

  Simple, Firsts, Finishing

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• To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime.

  James Elkins

  Beautiful, Morning, Blood

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.4, Routledge

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• What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.

  James Elkins

  Arte, Pensamiento, Importante

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.3, Routledge

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• Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer

  James Elkins

  Seers, Seeing

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• Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.

  James Elkins

  Years, Trying, Want

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.187, Routledge

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• A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow of the entire Earth, cast upward onto the atmosphere itself... I saw it over the great plains, and I felt as if I could sense the Earth pivoting silently under my feet.

  James Elkins

  Dark, Feet, Atmosphere

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• The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset... looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high in the sky over the place the sun has set, and then it quickly expands and sinks until it blends with the colors underneath.

  James Elkins

  Sunset, Color, Sky

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• Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

  James Elkins

  Moving, Giving, Looks

  "Are Artists Bored by Their Work?" by James Elkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 15, 2010.

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• The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter.

  James Elkins

  Memories, Gestures, Matter

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.2, Routledge

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• Es la fértil alucinación lo que hace que la pintura sea tan convincente. La pintura es como los números del numerólogo, siempre contando pero nunca sumando, siempre hablando pero nunca diciendo nada racional, siempre jugando a ser abstracto pero nunca saliendo del cuerpo coagulado.

  James Elkins

  Play, Numbers, Leaving

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.49, Routledge

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• The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.

  James Elkins

  Oil, Discovery, Brilliant

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Most people would guess that the sun is fifty or a hundred times brighter than the moon, but it's a half million times brighter - evidence of the amazing capacity of our eyes to adjust to light and dark.

  James Elkins

  Eye, Dark, Moon

  James Elkins (2007). “How to Use Your Eyes”, p.215, Routledge

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• Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.

  James Elkins

  Mood, Inarticulate, Projection

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.45, Routledge

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• Me gustaría entender por qué parece normal contemplar los asombrosos logros conseguidos por artistas inabordablemente ambiciosos, luminosamente piadosos y extrañamente obsesionados, y desecharlos con unos cuantos comentarios irónicos.

  James Elkins

  Artist, Achievement, Ambitious

  James Elkins (2005). “Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings”, p.6, Routledge

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• At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colours of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright I could not remember having seen it on any object.

  James Elkins

  Music, Fire, Rainbow

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