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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
NatureArtDrawingExpressionInterpretation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in an art class to discuss the differences between observation and artistic representation.
More from Edgar Degas
All quotes →No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Edgar DegasRead
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
Edgar DegasRead
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.
Edgar DegasRead
The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.
Edgar DegasRead
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.
Edgar DegasRead
Similar quotes
That's the kind of music I want SoulBird to represent: music with intelligence and heart, music that moves people in their souls and their bodies. Music with wings.
India ArieRead
Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.
Franz LisztRead
But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.
Christopher NolanRead
In architecture it isn't enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful. It can also be different. It can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art. [] I like and respect Brasília very much. It is a simple city, a rational one. I always defend the urban design of Brasília
Oscar NiemeyerRead
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
William FaulknerRead
In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.
Freeman DysonRead