There is force and vitality in a first sketch from life which the after-work rarely has. You want a picture to seize you as forcibly as if a man had seized you by the shoulder! It should impress you like reality!
Interpretation
The initial sketch from life captures raw energy and vitality that later artistic revisions often lack.
William Morris Hunt emphasizes the unique power and immediacy found in a first sketch made directly from life, suggesting that such spontaneous creations possess a vitality and impact that can be diluted in later, more polished works. He argues that art should engage the viewer with the same intensity as a physical interaction, signaling the importance of capturing genuine moments of inspiration.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the importance of spontaneity in art creation.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.
Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
Art teaches you the philosophy of life, and if you can't learn it from art, you can't learn it at all. It shows you that there is no perfection. There is light, and there is shadow. Everything is in half tint.
When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.
[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.
Critics... They're like traffic cops. They say what they have to say, then leave, and another guy moves in ,and he has his say - and it's often just the opposite. The result is either critical acclaim or critical murder, and neither has any bearing on my music or direction.
When I go to Comic-Cons and people line up for autographs, so many people have a story about how they are moved, how they get tearful about what 'Back To The Future' meant to them.
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