If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful. — Michelangelo A particularly pappy talk show I watched yesterday featured a segment entitled "Minute Masterclass," prompting me to wonder: Why do so many broadcasters and web-content producers think we expect...

Painting a "picture" is meaningless. One paints beauty. — David Leffel In perhaps my favorite semester of college, I took a philosophy course on beauty. Philosophers call the study of beauty "aesthetics" and for 2,500 years have  argued over aesthetics questions like "does a painting actually exist?" and...

Whatever the objects of his attention, the painter will not make them say what they are without thereby learning what he is. — Jean-Paul Sartre Just when I think I've about had it with party strife, microbes, blizzards, intolerance and inequality, painting comes along to pick me up. Still-life...

Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him. — Lord Chesterfield Originally, "slow food" founder Carlo Petrini didn't mean to start a global movement 3o years ago. He merely wanted Europeans to preserve local cuisines. But Petrini's "Slow Food...

Home is the nicest word there is. — Laura Ingalls Wilder A collector recently told me she's buying my painting Entenmann's Trio because it reminds her of home. "I grew up in New York," she said, "and have fond memories of boxes of their cakes on our kitchen...

In every moment, in every thing, eternity is present. — Wols Painting trains you to find the "ungraspable abstract" in things, the eternal forms obscured by ordinary perception, and to render them as your emotions dictate. It's both those qualities—the eternal and the emotional—that make good paintings so...

We don't make movies to make more money. We make more money to make more movies. - Walt Disney Let's be honest: I paint to make money. But that's the least of it. I paint better to see the world because, as Wittgenstein said, "the world is all that...

The job of an artist is to offer a sanctuary of beauty to an ugly world – Jeff Goins A few years ago, University of Chicago historian Tom Smith asked 27,000 Americans to evaluate their jobs. He found that, of nearly 200 occupations, painters scored fifth for...

Painting is another way of keeping a diary. — Pablo Picasso I dashed off Social Distancing last March, the morning I realized Covid-19 was not just some flu, but "really real." Since that morning ten months ago, 389,000 Americans have died of the virus, including a close family...

An interest in things is and always was at the root of art. — John Sloan From as early as he can remember, self-taught Tennessee artist H.R. Lovell has loved things—the more ordinary, the better. "I might see things different as a painter that somebody else may have...