The finest landscape in the world is improved by a good inn in the foreground.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
Start with the foreground. Compositions fail when the foreground is treated as an afterthought.
Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.
I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.
I've gradually risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground.
So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.
Avoid distant views, paint objects close up. If the foreground is well done the distance will take care of itself.
It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes into the foreground.
Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.
Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground.
There is no foreground or background, only a continuity of interlacing relationships
Artists talk about art in sort of straightforward terms, more like the way you talk about plumbing fixtures. Does it function well? Does it bring the hot water up from the cellar efficiently, or does it lose too much thermodynamic energy in the process? Artists are also very ruthless with each other and can be very brutal in evaluating each other's work because their criteria is almost more mechanistic. Does it do what it's supposed to be doing in an efficient way? That doesn't mean that intention is not part of the conversation, but it's not the foreground.
There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.
If there's no background, no foreground, no opposition, no complements, then there's no change becasue there's no subject and object.
N. T. Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds
With humans you would say, "Don't stand over there. " and that would probably work. With puppets, you can't stand over there because you would see the guy underneath. So it is a lot of foreground stuff.
Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
A background can be painted in the same range of values as the foreground by reversing the light effect. In the shadow plane, paint the lights cool and the shadows warm, and in the sunlight plane, paint the lights warm and shadows cool.
