I. From Leonardo da Vinci:

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."

"Learn diligence before speedy execution."

"Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art."

"Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom."

"I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand... These questions and other strange phenomena engage my thought throughout my life."

"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind."

"That painter who has no doubts will achieve little."

"The painter's mind is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely in creating the many kinds of animals, plants, fruits, landscapes, countrysides, ruins, and awe-inspiring places."

"Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason."

II. "I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down." Georgia O'Keeffe

III. "Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion." Vincent Van Gogh

IV. "He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen." Pablo Picasso

V. From John Singer Sargent:

"You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh."

"Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen."

"If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents."

"To work is to pray."

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