Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
Edgar DegasRead
What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.
Interpretation
Capturing nature in art involves a different process than simply placing it in a physical space.
Edgar Degas emphasizes the distinction between simply setting a scene from nature and the artistic process of interpreting and rendering it through drawing. This highlights the complexity of artistic expression, suggesting that the act of creating art requires deeper insight and skill than mere observation or arrangement of natural elements.
In practice
This quote could be used in an art class to discuss the differences between observation and artistic representation.
Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.
You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.
Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand.
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.
The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.
His belief in the power of music to convey ideas - not just entertain - has filtered down to musicians in every field, from alt-rock to hip-hop, from Bruce Springsteen and U2 to Arcade Fire and Kanye West. Popular music is different because of Johnny Cash.
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