Popularity: 3
Vote:   | Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me (raw young pupil that I was) that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh... I do hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. When proud feelings come I step up over them to the realm of work, to the thing I want, the liveness of the thing itself. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good, - or you might find the cake had caraway seeds, and you hate them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England's schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man's understanding... I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Let the movement be slow and savour of solidity at the base and rise quivering to the tree tops and to the sky, always rising to meet it joyously and tremulously... the spirit must be... perpetually moving through, carrying on and inducing a thirst for more and a desire to rise. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind... each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth... So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul... let your roots creep forth, gaining strength. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it! |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The sun enriched the old poles grandly... The mothers expressed all womanhood - the big wooden hands holding the child were so full of tenderness they had to be distorted enormously in order to contain it all. Womanhood was strong in Kitwancool. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What do I want to express? The subject means little. The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing. |