The Art Spirit

All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one’s faculties.

We are all different; we are to do different things and see different life. Education is a self-product, a matter of asking questions and getting the best answers we can get. We read a book, a novel, any book, we are interested in it to the degree we find in it answers to our questions.

It is not desirable to devote all your time to an appreciation of art. Art should drive you forth. It should be an incentive to life. The greatest value of art to the appreciator is in that it stimulates to personal activity.

Your drawing should be an expression of your spiritual sight.

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.

Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. They can help you. All the past can help you.

Join no creed, but respect all for the truth that is in them.

I believe in the study of technique. One should know as far as possible all the possibilities of a medium.

No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty.

There is the heart and the mind, the Puritan idea is that the mind must be master. I think the heart should be master and the mind should be the tool and servant of the heart. As it is, we give too much attention to laws and not enough to principles. The man who wants to produce art must have the emotional side first, and this must be reinforced by