John Fabian Carlson (May 5, 1875 – May 19, 1947) was a Swedish-born American Impressionist painter.
It is the ability to determine consciously what it is that interests him, and why, that differentiates the artist from the art student.
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.
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.
You will learn to paint trees only by understanding them, their growth, their nature, their movement - and realizing that they are conscious living things. A tree seldom if ever encroaches upon the liberty of another tree. It never wastes its growth in unnecessary twistings.
If you train yourself in memory work, you fearlessly attack and rearrange your material, for you can retain your original impression.
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!
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.
To the artist, the forest is an asylum of peace and dancing shadows.
The artist himself is often surprised at the finished work of art. He cannot tell 'how it happened', nor could he repeat the feat at someone's bidding.
Clouds are fascinating to paint because they are the only element in a landscape that possesses free movement.
If you're going to paint from photos, make sure you've painted for at least ten years.
We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.
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.
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.
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.
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.