John F. Carlson Quotes

• Clouds are fascinating to paint because they are the only element in a landscape that possesses free movement.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• The great paintings are the ones with the most subtle value relationships. The closer you could bring your values and still distinguish between them, the stronger you were as a painter.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Trust your feelings entirely about colour, and then, even if you arrive at no infallible colour theory, you will at least have the credit of having your own colour sense.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Art is a thing so much of the imagination, of the soul, that it is difficult to descend to the fundamentals of technique and yet make it plain to the student that these are but the ‘means’ and not an end in themselves.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Reserve is strength; overstatement is weakness. No one cares to hear the singer’s topmost notes when the voice is ‘nigh onto breaking.’

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Too much reality in a picture is always a disappointment to the imaginative soul. We love suggestion and not hard facts.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Art is the transmittable, personal impression of one quality in the quantity before us. It is the ability to determine consciously what it is that interests him, and why, that differentiates the artist from the art student.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• It is a curious fact that out-of-door nature is to the beginner an enormously overloaded ‘property room.’ He sees, for instance, the myriad of leaves upon the tree long before he sees the tree at all.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• If you’re going to paint from photos, make sure you’ve painted for at least ten years.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• To the artist, the forest is an asylum of peace and dancing shadows.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• The underlying principles or fundamentals should be so hidden away by the beauty they are eventually to support, that it would require much digging to disclose them.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• The more we advance, the more we realize with Whistler that nature is never right.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• If you train yourself in memory work, you fearlessly attack and rearrange your material, for you can retain your original impression.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• It is the ability to determine consciously what it is that interests him, and why, that differentiates the artist from the art student.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• In the anxiety to get beautiful colour harmony do not exhaust all combinations on one canvas.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Rest assured that if you work every day at your art, using the materials nearest at hand, you will gradually discover such beauty in them that they will fill you with happiness.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• The eye and soul are caressed in the contemplation of form and colour. The subtle changes of colour over a surface – transitions that are like music – are intangible in their reaction upon us. There is an immediate sensuous appeal!

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• A work of art in paint should be beautiful and expressive as abstract colour and form and should not interest us necessarily in any ‘story’ outside of itself – or else it belongs to the field of illustration.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks the contemplation of a work of art.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

• Good colour really means good taste; and ‘powerful’ colour means a reserve, to give a climax its full force, and not ‘red, white, and blue all over.

  John F. Carlson

  Topics in Art

John F. Carlson (23)

Birth:	5th May, 1875
Death:	19th May, 1947
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Painter

About

John F. Carlson was born in Sweden. He was a Swedish-born American Impressionist painter. He attended evening art classes at the Art Students League of Buffalo, New York. He won a scholarship in 1903 or 1904 to study with Lovell Birge Harrison at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York. He also painted landscapes of the Far West and the Canadian Rockies, founded the John F. Carlson School of Landscape Painting in Woodstock, N.Y., and authored Elementary Principles of Landscape Painting.

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