Elkins Quotes & Sayings

The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally it is beyond the range of printed pictures. — James Elkins

Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts. — James Elkins

Always remember that God will honor your sacrifice. "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." Jeremiah 29:13 KJV. — Nannette Elkins

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism. — James Elkins

It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art. — James Elkins

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

Love, I think, is by necessity constructed of a ladder of lies you climb together. — Kimberly Elkins

Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. — Ross Elkins

I can't claim that I came out of it the winner. But I felt a lot like a kid who has finally found the guts to stand up to the schoolyard bully and tell him to take his best shot: bruised and bloody and thinking maybe that it hadn't been such a hot idea, but - what do you know? - still standing. — Aaron Elkins

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

When I was here there was still a requirement that students had to swim 50 yards to graduate ... because Harry Elkins Widener had drowned with the sinking of the Titanic. And it made me very grateful at the time that he had not gone down in a plane crash. — Barney Frank

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

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

In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life. (Beyond Religion, p. 81) — David N. Elkins

It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body. — James Elkins

Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors ... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids ... mixed together with powdered stones to give color ... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal. — James Elkins

A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of coloured slurries on the palette. — James Elkins

Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer — James Elkins

His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time. — Aaron Elkins

Daniel Elkins. The man credited with hunting vampires to extinction, killed by vampires. Ironic way to go, but he wouldn't have it any other way. He told me on more than one occasion that he knew he'd go down bloody, and he was right. — David Reed

God is a strange and mysterious master, and I no doubt am a strange and mysterious servant, but from this day forward I am His. I am forever changed, by my own choice, and I wonder if He is too. — Kimberly Elkins

The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of. — Stanley Elkins

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

While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122) — David N. Elkins

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

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

Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods. — James Elkins

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

Julian, I need you. Not in ways you can see. But in ways that I feel. If I'm your life raft, we're in trouble - because you're mine. — Sabrina Elkins

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people
including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh
struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124) — David N. Elkins

If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours. — James Elkins

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

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

To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing. — James Elkins

If someone told me that I could live my life again free of depression provided I was willing to give up the gifts depression has given me
the depth of awareness, the expanded consciousness, the increased sensitivity, the awareness of limitation, the tenderness of love, the meaning of friendship, the apreciation of life, the joy of a passionate heart
I would say, 'This is a Faustian bargain! Give me my depressions. Let the darkness descend. But do not take away the gifts that depression, with the help of some unseen hand, has dredged up from the deep ocean of my soul and strewn along the shores of my life. I can endure darkness if I must; but I cannot lie without these gifts. I cannot live without my soul.' (p. 188) — David Elkins

Perhaps the day will come where the validity of one's spirituality will be judged not by the correctness of one's theology but by the authenticity of one's spiritual life. When that day comes, an authentically spiritual Buddhist and an authentically spiritual Christian may find that they have more in common with each other than they do with those in their respective religions who have failed to develop their spirituality. (Beyond Religion, p. 98) — David N. Elkins

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

I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments ... — James Elkins

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

The opposite of a glance ... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second. — James Elkins