My talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size… has ever surpassed my courage.

Peter Paul Rubens

The Three Graces 1636/38

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 – May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.

In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Paul_Rubens

My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly.

Raoul Dufy

The Red Violin 1934

Raoul Dufy(3 June 1877 – 23 March 1953) was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colourful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics, textiles and decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Dufy

Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.

Franz Marc

Deer In Woods 1912

Franz Marc (February 8, 1880 – March 4, 1916) was one of the principal painters and printmakers of the German Expressionist movement. He was a founding member of “Der Blaue Reiter” (“The Blue Rider”), an almanac the name of which later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.
His name was on a list of notable artists to be withdrawn from combat in World War I. Before the orders were carried out, he was struck in the head and killed instantly by a shell splinter during the Battle of Verdun (1916).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Marc

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

Ginevra de’ Benci  1474

Leonardo DA VINCI (b. 1452, Vinci, Republic of Florence [now in Italy]–d. May 2, 1519, Cloux, Fr.), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.

http://webmuseum.poboxes.info/wm/paint/auth/vinci/

Practise what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

Portrait of Saskia as Flora 1635

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (July 15, 1606 – October 4, 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age.

Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, his later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship. Yet his drawings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained highand for twenty years he taught nearly every important Dutch painter. Rembrandt’s greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.

In both painting and printmaking he exhibited a complete knowledge of classical iconography, which he molded to fit the requirements of his own experience; thus, the depiction of a biblical scene was informed by Rembrandt’s knowledge of the specific text, his assimilation of classical composition, and his observations of the Jewish population of Amsterdam. Because of his empathy for the human condition, he has been called “one of the great prophets of civilization.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Balthus

Girl and Cat 1937

Balthasar Klossowski (or Kłossowski) de Rola (February 29, 1908 in Paris – February 18, 2001 in Rossinière, Switzerland), best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist.

Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. A telegram send to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: “NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthus

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Robert Motherwell

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 57,1957-60

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.

Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell’s father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank. Robert Motherwell received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and completed one year of a philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard before shifting fields to art and art history, studying under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. His rigorous background in rhetoric would serve him and the abstract expressionists well, as he was able to tour the country giving speeches that articulated to the public what it was that he and his friends were doing in New York. Without his tireless devotion to communication (in addition to his prolific painting), well-known abstract expressionists like Rothko, who was extremely shy and rarely left his studio, might not have made it into the public eye. Motherwell’s collected writings are a truly exceptional window into the abstract expressionist world. He was a lucid and engaging writer, and his essays are considered a bridge for those who want to learn more about non-representational art but who are put off by dense art criticism.

Motherwell spent significant time in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Cy Twombly studied under him.

Motherwell’s greatest goal was to use the staging of his work to convey to the viewer the mental and physical engagement of the artist with the canvas. He preferred using the starkness of black paint as one of the basic elements of his paintings. He was known to frequently employ the technique of diluting his paint with turpentine to create a shadow effect. His long-running series of paintings “Elegies for the Spanish Republic” is generally considered his most significant project.

Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor of Wolfgang Paalens journal Dyn, which was edited 1942-44 in six numbers. He also edited Paalens collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first Number of Problems of Contemporary Art.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth houses the largest collection of Motherwell’s works. The Walker Art Center also has a nearly-complete collection of his prints. The Empire State Plaza holds some of his work.

He was married to artist Helen Frankenthaler as his third wife, but was subsequently divorced from Frankenthaler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Motherwell

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

Jean Dubuffet

Figure Xl 1974

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (July 31, 1901 – May 12, 1985) was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

Rockwell Kent

Workers of the World Unite, 1937

Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and writer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_Kent

It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

Edouard Manet

 

Olympia 1863

(b. Jan. 23, 1832, Paris, France–d. April 30, 1883, Paris)
French painter and printmaker who in his own work accomplished the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism. Manet broke new ground in choosing subjects from the events and appearances of his own time and in stressing the definition of painting as the arrangement of paint areas on a canvas over and above its function as representation. Exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, his Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass”) aroused the hostility of the critics and the enthusiasm of a group of young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionists. His other notable works include Olympia (1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/manet/