Quotes & Sayings About Copying Art

But the fact remains that copying is one of the most time-honored training methods in the art world.It forms the basis of the whole concept of apprenticeship. — David Rankin

Every child should try everything: sport, music, art, mathematics; they can do it all. Copying and competition are now seen as twin evils, but they are both useful tools. — Tony Buzan

Pictorial art is relating tones to create beauty - like chords of music - not the faithful copying of the model. — Harvey Dunn

A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character ... the artist on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature. — Auguste Rodin

Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn't looking. — Neil Gaiman

There is an incident which occurred at the examination during my first year at the high school and which is worth recording. Mr. Giles, the Educational Inspector, had come on a visit of inspection. He had set us five words to write as a spelling exercise. One of the words was 'kettle'. I had mis-spelt it. The teacher tried to prompt me with the point of his boot, but I would not be prompted. It was beyond me to see that he wanted me to copy the spelling from my neighbour's slate, for I had thought that the teacher was there to supervise us against copying. The result was that all the boys, except myself, were found to have spelt every word correctly. Only I had been stupid. The teacher tried later to bring this stupidity home to me, but without effect. I never could learn the art of 'copying'. — Mahatma Gandhi

Of the book of God
Thou art a copying,
A mirror, wherein showed
The beauty of the King.
All God ever wrought
Dwelleth not apart;
All thou hast ever sought,
Find it in thy heart. — Jalaluddin Rumi

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter. — J.G. Ballard

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead. — Cindy Sherman

The problem with trying to be relevant is it makes us copy what culture is already doing. To be relevant, you have to copy what is cool. So we put our mouths on the tailpipe of secular culture in hopes we can recycle some of it and use it for ourselves. The problem with this is that it automatically puts us ten to fifteen years behind culture because rather than setting the precedent, we are copying their systems. This is where we get a huge section of Christian apparel and coffee mugs that simply copy secular logos. My favorite is the shirt with the words "Holy Spirit" printed in the same font and logo as Sprite. Or the one with "A bread crumb and a fish" instead of Abercrombie and Fitch. We call it redeeming, but it's actually stealing. Making bad art is bad in and of itself, but if we are Christians, this takes on a whole other level of weight. Because we are called to mirror and reflect God, everything we do should give people a proper picture of who he is. — Jefferson Bethke

On the board was a list of words and phrases which her mother considered not suitable for use in college T-shirt design. She had been asked about them so often that in the end she had started a blacklist of banned words to which everyone could refer. Every time someone thought of a new one, she unflinchingly wrote it down ...
Rose read through the list, and turned back to her letter.
These are the words I learned to spell in Mummy's art class today, she wrote, and sighed a little as she began the tedious job of copying from the board. — Hilary McKay

Some people who look at abstract art say 'I could do that.' A good response is, 'Go ahead but then you'll be accused of copying. — Christopher Willard

Art came fluidly, so I was able to teach myself many of the things I thought were important by copying and mimicking my artistic idols. — John Dyer Baizley

Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates

I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided--'visions' is
too serious a word--our looks, two looks:
art 'copying from life' and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
--the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese. — Elizabeth Bishop

Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction. — Walter J. Phillips

Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of. — Henry James

I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one. — Art Spiegelman