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
People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Degas emphasizes his desire to depict the essence and energy of movement rather than merely painting dancers.
In this quote, Edgar Degas expresses a profound ambition that transcends the mere representation of dancers; he seeks to encapsulate the very nature of movement. This reflects his artistic vision where the fluidity, rhythm, and vitality of life are his true subjects, inviting viewers to feel the dynamism present in his works.
Themes
MovementArtDancersExpressionEnergy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used when discussing the importance of capturing emotion in art during a lecture.
More from Edgar Degas
All quotes βNo 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
I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind.
Francesca Lia BlockRead
But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I donβt want to live in that world.
Katherine BooRead
I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.
Karl Ove KnausgardRead
My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.
Mary ShelleyRead
Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
Lev GrossmanRead
Black is the Color and none is the number
Bob DylanRead