Canvas Signs With Quotes

The canvas isn’t empty. It’s full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don’t even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it.

Life is like canvas and when you die you have to sign the bottom corner. Will you be happy with what the painting looks like?

I’m sorry you haven’t a more pristine canvas – she paused signing to indicate her body from head to toe – upon which to depict a princess. Selena stopped Lyra’s hands in midair by dragging velvety-peach sleeves up her arms. “I disagree. The best canvas has flaws and furrows... and tells a story of its own before the paint is even added.

That night, the sky poured out such torrents that the city was a drum set, every surface a source of rhythms, pavements and windows and canvas awnings, street signs and parked cars, Dumpsters throbbing like tom-toms, garbage-can lids swishing as the wind swirled bursts of rain in imitation of a drummer brush-stroking the batter head of a snare.

Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.

I remember looking on those two sad, earnest, shadowed faces, and wondering wether I could trace the mysterious expression which is said to foretell an early death. I had some fond superstitious hope that the column divided their fates from hers, who stood apart in the canvas, as in life she survived. I liked to see that the bright side of the pillar was towards her - that the light in the picture fell on her; I might more truly have sought in her presentment - nay, in her living face - for the sign of death - in her prime.

Women do not simply have faces, as men do; they are identified with their faces. Men have a naturalistic relation to their faces. Certainly they care whether they are good-looking or not. They suffer over acne, protruding ears, tiny eyes; they hate getting bald. But there is a much wider latitude in what is esthetically acceptable in a man’s face than what is in a woman’s. A man’s face is defined as something he basically doesn’t need to tamper with; all he has to do is keep it clean. He can avail himself of the options for ornament supplied by nature: a beard, a mustache, longer or shorter hair. But he is not supposed to disguise himself. What he is “really” like is supposed to show. A man lives through his face; it records the progressive stages of his life. And since he doesn’t tamper with his face, it is not separate from but is completed by his body – which is judged attractive by the impression it gives of virility and energy. By contrast, a woman’s face is potentially separate from her body. She does not treat it naturalistically. A woman’s face is the canvas upon which she paints a revised, corrected portrait of herself. One of the rules of this creation is that the face not show what she doesn’t want it to show. Her face is an emblem, an icon, a flag. How she arranges her hair, the type of make-up she uses, the quality of her complexion – all these are signs, not of what she is “really” like, but of how she asks to be treated by others, especially men. They establish her status as an “object.

The Three-Decker "The three-volume novel is extinct." Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail. It cost a watch to steer her, and a week to shorten sail; But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best— The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest. Fair held the breeze behind us—’twas warm with lovers’ prayers. We’d stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs. They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed, And they worked the old three-decker to the Islands of the Blest. By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook, Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed, And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest. We asked no social questions—we pumped no hidden shame— We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came: We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell. We weren’t exactly Yussufs, but—Zuleika didn’t tell. No moral doubt assailed us, so when the port we neared, The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered. ’Twas fiddle in the forc’s’le—’twas garlands on the mast, For every one got married, and I went ashore at last. I left ’em all in couples a-kissing on the decks. I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques. In endless English comfort by county-folk caressed, I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest! That route is barred to steamers: you’ll never lift again Our purple-painted headlands or the lordly keeps of Spain. They’re just beyond your skyline, howe’er so far you cruise In a ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws. Swing round your aching search-light—’twill show no haven’s peace. Ay, blow your shrieking sirens to the deaf, gray-bearded seas! Boom out the dripping oil-bags to skin the deep’s unrest— And you aren’t one knot the nearer to the Islands of the Blest! But when you’re threshing, crippled, with broken bridge and rail, At a drogue of dead convictions to hold you head to gale, Calm as the Flying Dutchman, from truck to taffrail dressed, You’ll see the old three-decker for the Islands of the Blest. You’ll see her tiering canvas in sheeted silver spread; You’ll hear the long-drawn thunder ’neath her leaping figure-head; While far, so far above you, her tall poop-lanterns shine Unvexed by wind or weather like the candles round a shrine! Hull down—hull down and under—she dwindles to a speck, With noise of pleasant music and dancing on her deck. All’s well—all’s well aboard her—she’s left you far behind, With a scent of old-world roses through the fog that ties you blind. Her crew are babes or madmen? Her port is all to make? You’re manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming’s sake? Well, tinker up your engines—you know your business best— She’s taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest!

Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad. It is a complex picture and it may be that we have given only a few strong, uncoordinated strokes of the brush, leaving the canvas as confusing and meaningless as an early Picasso. Certainly the British and the French do not understand Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted. But Spengler included Germany in the decline of the West, and indeed the Nazi reversion to the ancient, primitive, Germanic myths is a sign of her retrogression, as is her burning of books and suppression of liberty and learning.

Some hours before the king retires, the groom of the bedchamber calls in four yeomen of the bedchamber, and four yeomen from the Wardrobe of the Beds bring in the king's sheets. The straw mattress that forms the first layer of bedding if pricked all over with a dagger, before a cover is stretched across it; while they prick and stretch, the yeomen pray for the king, to come safe through the rigours of the night ahead. When the canvas is taut, one of them seats himself on the bedframe, topples backwards most reverently, draws up his unshod feet, and rolls the width of the bed; pauses, and rolls back. If the gentlemen are satisfied there is nothing sharp or noxious beneath, the feather beds are laid down and pummeled all over: you hear the steady thud of fist on down, All eight yeomen, moving in step, stretch taut the sheets and blankets, and as they tuck in each corner, they make the sign of the cross. The fur coverlet follows, a soft swish and slither; then the curtains are drawn around the bed, and a page sits down to guard it. So the king's long day closes.

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver. "Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station." "It looks like a cemetery." "It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin." "You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?" West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly." They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward better things," Garrett translated beneath her breath.

Then give me your pain, Master. I can bear it as long as I know your lips will touch every mark when you're done, signing it as your work.

As the geniuses we are, we do not look but see. To look at something is to look at it within its limitations. I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other things. But things do not have their own limitations. Nothing limits itself. The sea gulls circling on the invisible currents, the cat on my desk, the siren of a distant ambulance are not somehow distinct from the environment; they are the environment. To look at them I must look for what I take them to be. I was not looking at the sea gulls as though it was the sea gulls who happened to be there-I was looking for something to make this example. I might have seen them as a sign that land is not far, or that the sea is not far; I could have been looking for a form to reproduce on a canvas or in a poem. To look at is to look for. It is to bring the limitations with us.

What’s at Oranienplatz?’ Now they moved together from single to communal stories. As they continued moving towards Oranienplatz, Gino explained that it was an occupied space. Refugees from Africa seeking asylum, seeking a warm, safe haven, had built there a shantytown of tents and shelters. There were ramshackle huts, stretched canvas beneath bare trees, there were signs that read: ‘Kein Mensch ist illegal’; ‘Refugees are welcome here; Deportation is murder’. It was a community, said Gino, an ephemeral community.

Perception already stylizes, A woman passing by is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for mе, a colored mannequin, or a spectacle...She is a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk or even in the simple shock of her heel on the ground—as the tension of the bow is present in each fiber of wood--a very noticeable variation of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speaking that I possess in my self-awareness because I am incarnate. If I am also a painter, what will be transmitted to the canvas will no longer be only a vital or sensual value. There will be in the painting not just "a woman" or "an unhappy woman" or "a hatmaker." There will also be the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of handling it, and of interpreting it by a face as by clothing, by agility of gesture as by inertia of body—in short, the emblem of a certain relationship to being.

There are two sides to the act of painting: the spot or line of color put on a point of the canvas, and its effect in the whole, which is incommensurable with it, since it is almost nothing yet suffices to change a portrait or a landscape. One who, with his nose against the painter's brush, observed the painter from too close would see only the wrong side of his work. The wrong side is a feeble movement of the brush or pen of Poussin; the right side is the sunlit glade which that movement releases. A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion. The impression was prodigious, so much so that Matisse himself was moved, they say. That same brush which, seen with the naked eye, leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanding time—in the imminence of a world's creation— to try ten possible movements, dance in front of the canvas, brush it lightly several times, and crash down finally like a lightning stroke upon the one line necessary. Of course, there is something artificial in this analysis. And Matisse would be wrong if, putting his faith in the film, he believed that he really chose between all possible lines that day and, like the God of Leibniz, solved an immense problem of maximum and minimum. He was not a demiurge; he was a man. He did not have in his mind's eye all the gestures possible, and in making his choice he did not have to eliminate all but one. It is slow motion which enumerates the possibilities. Matisse, set within a man's time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his work in progress and brought his brush toward the line which called for it in order that the painting might finally be that which it was ln the process of becoming. By a simple gesture he resolved the problem which in retrospect seemed imply an infinite number of data (as the hand in the iron filings according to Bergson, achieves in a single stroke the arrangement which will make a place for it). Everything happened in the human world of perception and gesture; and the camera gives us a fascinating version of the event only by making us believe that the painter's hand operated in the physical world where an infinity of options is possible. And yet, Matisse's hand did hesitate. Consequently, there was a choice and the chosen line was chosen in such a way as to observe, scattered out over the painting, twenty conditions which were unformulated even informulable for anyone but Matisse, since they were only defined and imposed by the intention of executing this painting which did not yet exist.

It’s funny how the painter’s not: the one with pigment smeared into her skin the one whose body is as permanent a fixture in this studio as stool, palette, easel, the only one whose heart is flung across this canvas. No: the painter merely signs his name and takes his gold.

By early afternoon the Carpathia had passed the last of the ice and could begin to pick up speed, but at 4:00 p.m its engines were stopped. Father Anderson then appeared on deck in his clerical garb, followed by Carpathia crewmen carrying four corpses sewn into canvas bags. These were the bodies of two male passengers, one fireman, and one seaman, that had been brought aboard from the lifeboats. Each of the canvas bags in turn was laid on a wide plank and covered with a flag. As the words “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep” were read aloud, the bodies were tipped into the sea one at a time. A large crowd stood nearby with heads bared. The canvas bags had been weighted so that the bodies would fall feet first but one of them struck the water flat. A Carpathia passenger wrote that he would never forget the sound of that splash. One of those buried at sea was first-class passenger William F. Hoyt, the heavy man who had been pulled into Boat 14 and died shortly thereafter. When May Futrelle learned that a large man had been lifted into one of the lifeboats, she questioned the crew of Boat 14 but soon realized that the man they described could not have been her husband. She also heard that Archibald Gracie had been pulled under with the ship and worked up her courage to ask him if he had suffered as he was being dragged down. Gracie reassured her that if he had never come up, he would have had no more suffering, giving May some comfort that perhaps Jacques had not endured an agonizing death. That afternoon Charles Lightoller had a serious talk with the three other surviving officers, Pitman, Boxhall, and Lowe, about what lay ahead. It was agreed that their best hope for escaping what Lightoller called “the inquisition” that awaited in New York was to immediately board the Cedric, scheduled to sail for Liverpool on Thursday. Their case was taken to Bruce Ismay who sent a message to Philip Franklin suggesting that the Cedric be held for the Titanic’s crew and himself. Ismay also asked that clothes and shoes be put on board for him. The cable was signed “Yamsi,” his coded signature for personal messages.

Have you ever seen the teacher of an art class at work? Frequently he will find in the drawing of one pupil a flaw which is so typical of most students’ work at the same stage that he will call the other pupils of the class around the easel. Using the imperfect canvas as his text, he will branch into criticism, advice, exhortation, and will occasionally go on to rub out the mistake and draw the line or put in the color as it should have been done. If you will observe the group at this moment you will discover that, tragically enough, everyone seems to be benefiting by the lecture except the very pupil to whom it should be most valuable. In almost every case the one whose work is providing the example will be quivering, nervous, sometimes tearful, often angry—in short, giving every sign that he is feeling so personally humiliated and insulted that he is reacting at an infantile level. If you ask for help, or put yourself into the relation of a pupil to a teacher, learn to advance by your mistakes instead of suffering through them. Keep your attitude impersonal while you are being shown the road back to the right procedure. If you are in school, or taking class or private instruction, it is wise to take every opportunity to ask well-considered questions, then to act on the information, and finally—and very important—to report to your instructor as to your success or failure through following his advice. This is of advantage not only to you, but to him and his subsequent pupils, since he cannot know what practices are effective and what are only useful to himself and a few like him unless his pupils report in this fashion. If you must consistently report no progress, then one of two things must be true: that you are not fully understanding him, or that you are not working under the right master. After your period of apprenticeship is over, try not to weaken yourself or bring about self-doubt to such an extent that you must have help on minor points of procedure. Every physician and psychiatrist knows that there is a great class of “sufferers” who return again and again, asking so many and such trivial questions that it seems unlikely they could ever have grown to maturity if they were as helpless in all relations as they show themselves to their physicians. No one except a charlatan truly welcomes the appearance of such patients as these. The person who is looking for an excuse to blame his failure on another or who will not, if he can help it, grow up and settle his own difficulties, will go on asking advice until he draws his last breath, and even the astutest consultant may be forgiven if he sometimes mistakes an infrequent questioner for one of the weaker type. A good touchstone to show whether you may be only following a nervous habit of dependence is to ask yourself in every case: “Would I ask this if I had to pay a specialist’s fee for the answer?

Wouldn't it be convenient if I stayed forever locked here, turning my head as he signs his name to my work, never caring if anyone knows who actually bled onto the canvas?

A telling experience is that of Lucien Tessarolo, a French painter, who used to work side by side with a female chimpanzee, Kunda, on a canvas that both of them would sign at the end-Tessarolo with a signature, Kunda with a handprint. Tessarolo was impressed by Kunda's precision and harmonious choice of colors. The figurative elements that he added to their work were not always appreciated by the ape, however. Sometimes she reacted enthusiastically, but on occasion she rubbed Tessarolo's contributions out and waited to continue painting until he had come up with something else.

Colour and light
 playing seriously on the canvas,
 making stunning pictures.
 Breathtaking,
 wondrous, silent,
 wordless signs, leading to your inner self.
 Feel.
 The painter has given you a key to your own universe.  It brings you silence  in the midst of your tumultuous world.  The world is full of signposts,
 find them,  take them in.  Cherish them,  breathe in the moment.  Naked,  vulnerable,  fearless, silent.
 You are here to meet the I.

Your life is like a canvas, and when you die, you have to sign the bottom corner. Will you be happy with what the painting looks like?

I want to take our museum bodies and turn them into art galleries to show us how lovely we are. I want to dust off the fingerprints of old lovers, take down the signs that name our bodies ancient history, turn every wounded object inside us into something that can still be looked at and seen as beautiful, not an object from an era we are glad we are not living through any more. I want us to love ourselves like we love art. I want whole gallery walls dedicated to our soft hearts, vermilion and crimson and indigo across canvas after canvas framed in gold. I want sculptures made from the tears we cried over losing everything. I want our skins to be a celebration: The texture is what makes this art, all these lines and blemishes and spots that show the artist's love. I don't want us to look at ourselves as forgotten things we hate any more. I want us to look at ourselves and see art.

Fifty years ago he found the dinosaur in the barranca. Now, toothless, hairless and in his middle eighties, he was one of the oldest flying pilots in the world. Each morning he put on his white canvas flying-suit, pottered down to the Aero Club in his Moskva and hurled himself and his antique monoplane to the gales. The risk merely increased his appetite for life. The wind had polished his nose and coloured it pale lilac. I found him at lunch ladling the bortsch into the ivory orb of his head. He had made his room cheerful, in the Baltic way, with flowered curtains, geraniums, diplomas for stunt flying and a signed photograph of Neil Armstrong.

I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from this same old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosper home and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head with images of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spoken through my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights. All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul.

[comrades] are ashes, entrails, dung, stove smoke, clay, and they’ll all return to clay. They’re full of dirt, candle oil, droppings, dust. You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden singing promise, my dream, a distant call— O tender specter, happy chance, Again I heed the ancient lore, Again with beauty rare in stance, You beckon from the distant shore!” You, Book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't attack, won't insult, won't abandon! You're quiet--but you laugh, shout, and sing; you're obedient--but you amaze, tease and entice; you're small but you contain countless peoples. Nothing but a handful of letters, that's all, but if you feel like it, you can turn heads, confuse, spin, cloud, make tears spring to the eye, take away the breath, the entire soul will stir in the wind like a canvas, will rise in the waves and flap its wings! Sometimes a kind of wordless feeling tosses and turns in the chest, pounds its fists on the door, the walls: I'm suffocating! Let me out! How can you let that feeling out, all fuzzy and naked? What words ca you dress it in? We don't have any words, we don't know! Just like wild animals, or a blindlie bird, or a mermaid--no words, just a bellowing. But you open a book--and there they are, fabulous, flying words: O city! O wind! O snowstorms and blizzards! O azure abyss all raveled and tattered! Here am I! I'm blameless! I'm with you forever... ...Or there's bile and sadness and bitterness. The emptiness dries your eyes out and you search for the words, and here they are: But is the world not all alike? From the Cabbala of Chaldaic signs Throughout the ages, now and ever more, To the sky where the even star shines. The same old wisdom--born of ashes, And in that wisdom, like our twin, The face of longing, frailty, fear, and sin, Stares straight across the ages at us.