Etching Art Quotes

This was a face such as I had never seen before, even in the most fanciful of dreams, a face that was, in its way, a work of art. For it was light and dark, night and day, this world and the Otherworld. On the left side, the face of a youngish man, the skin weathered but fair, the eye gray and clear, the mouth well formed if unyielding in character. On all the right side, extending from an undrawn mark down the exact center, an etching of line and curve and feathery pattern, like the mask of some fierce bird of prey. An eagle? A goshawk? No, it was, I thought, a raven, even as far as the circles about the eye and the suggestion of predatory beak around the nostril. The mark of the raven. If I had not been so frightened, I might have laughed at the irony of it. The pattern extended down his neck and under the border of his leather jerkin and the linen shirt he wore beneath it. His head was completely shaven, and the skull, too, was colored the same, half-man, half-wild creature; some great artist of the inks and needle had wrought this over many days, and I imagined the pain must have been considerable.

......This is real power, real strength! Foolish humans, etch my name with fear! Me and, the name of this gun is <>......<>!!

In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough; for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the street outside—a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.   Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.   Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.   Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues.  A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.

Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.

The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste, artistic, and dull.

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.

I had a vision. I lay half asleep in the dirt. The sunset Behind the hills and burnt my skin. And in the dream I saw a throne--my throne, Built on the tower of my life. When I woke all I could think of was my Vision, etched so clearly on my mind. I worked for three days and three nights With no food or drink, until my vision Had become a reality--perfect in every Detail. I pondered the significance of this Edifice and shook off my trance.... I felt tired, I felt lonely, I felt confused, I felt so bloody confused, I felt like a right prat!

Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not; whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely, so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything's worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return. Coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect, and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots, seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home moon-landed, foreign; the Earth's gravitational pull an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of… Anyway . . . You sigh into the onslaught of identical days. One might as well, at a time . . . Well . . . Anyway . . . You're back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore, the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older. Nothing moves but the shifting tides of salt in your body. Your vision blears. You carry your weather with you, the big blue whale, a skeletal darkness. You come back with X-ray vision. Your eyes have become a hunger. You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone. Everything you see now, all of it: bone." A poem by - Eva H.D.

Only when I know I’m right. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it not? The delivery driver said I was ugly and you told him I wasn’t, that to you I was a work of art. Your actions prove my point.

a woman, nothing existed but the domestic sphere and those tiny flowers etched on the pages of my art book. For a woman to aspire to be a lawyer—well, possibly, the world would end. But an acorn grew into an oak tree, didn’t it?

He was beautiful. Whatever else he was, Sage was by far the most magnetic man I had ever seen. I had felt it in my dreams, and it was even more true in real life. I welcomed the chance to study him without his knowledge. He glanced up, and I quickly closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Had he seen me? The scratching stopped. He was looking at me, I knew it. I held my breath and willed my eyes not to pop open and see if he was staring. Finally the scratching started up again. I forced myself to slowly count to ten before I opened my eyelids the tiniest bit and peeked through my lashes. Good-he wasn’t looking at me. I opened my eyes a little wider. What was he doing? Moving only my eyes, I glanced down at the dirt floor in front of him… …and saw a picture of me, fast asleep. It was incredible. I could see his tools laid out beside the picture: rocks in several sizes and shapes, a couple of twigs…the most rudimentary materials, and yet what he was etching into the floor wouldn’t look out of place on an art gallery wall. It was beautiful…far more beautiful than I thought I actually looked in my sleep. Is that how he saw me? Sage lifted his head again, and I shut my eyes. I imagined him studying me, taking careful note of my features and filtering them through his own senses. My heartbeat quickened, and it took all my willpower to remain still. “You can keep pretending to be asleep if you’d like, but I don’t see a career for you as an actress,” he teased. My eyes sprang open. Sage’s head was again bent over his etching, but a grin played on his face as he worked. “You knew?” I asked, mortified. Sage put a finger to his lips, glancing toward Ben. “About two minutes before you woke up, I knew,” he whispered. “Your breathing hanged.” He bent back over the drawing, then impishly asked, “Pleasant dreams?” My heart stopped, and I felt myself blush bright crimson as I remembered our encounter in the bottom of the rowboat. I sent a quick prayer to whoever or whatever might be listening that I hadn’t re-enacted any of it in my sleep, then said as nonchalantly as possible, “I don’t know, I can’t remember what I dreamed about. Why?” He swapped out the rock in his hand for one with a thinner edge and worked for another moment. “No reason…just heard my name.” I hoped the dim moonlight shadowed the worst of my blush. “Your name,” I reiterated. “That’s…interesting. They say dreams sort out things that happen when we’re awake.” “Hmm. Did you sort anything out?” he asked. “Like I said, I can’t remember.” I knew he didn’t believe me. Time to change the subject. I nodded to the etching. “Can I come look?

You don’t get it just like you don’t get yourself. Sometimes the simple beauty of a woman is more powerful than anything. It doesn’t need to be a massive painting, it doesn’t need to be filled with a lot of things going on in the canvas space, and it doesn’t need a lot of fancy art techniques. It’s just her. Her beauty. Her in her raw form with those intangible attributes that drove men crazy. Those intangible qualities that could topple kings. Those made Leonardo paint her. Those are still bringing people here to look at her and ponder over. It’s real love. An unfiltered and non-romanticized version. It’s real because it doesn’t need to be anything more. Just like you don’t need to be anything more. You’ve got those intangible qualities to bring millions of people to visit a museum to see you every year. You in your raw form have that power. People don’t forget someone like that. They’re etched into your bones and molded into your core.

I’m not a huge fan of poetry. I’ll accept the argument that it’s an art form - being an expression of the imagination - but by that broad definition, so are Etch-A-Sketch drawings and Magic Aqua Sand sculptures. I don’t think anyone really likes poetry, apart from the ones writing it, and they only really like their own.

Judah and Jacob-Israel are not simple eponymous counters in an etiological tale (this is the flattening effect of some historical scholarship) but are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections as well as in their strengths. A histrionic Jacob blinded by excessive love and perhaps loving the excess; an impetuous, sometimes callous Judah, who is yet capable of candor when confronted with hard facts; a fiercely resolved, steel-nerved Tamar—all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature.

Then he walked through the house. It had grown smaller as he’d reached adulthood; was bigger again now, partly because it was empty; partly because property, anyway, looked huge now he was renting a one-bed in the capital. And partly because his past grew larger every day, and this was where most of it was. Even the absences told stories. Constellations of tiny holes in the walls were all that was left of the art that had hung here. He remembered finding Rose on the landing once, gazing at an etching, a few pencil lines summing up a doorway trailing ivy, and he hadn’t asked her what she was looking at—he could see what she was looking at—but wished now he’d thought to ask her what she saw.

Mr. Freeman: "Time's up, Melinda. Are you ready?" I hand over the picture. He takes it in his hands and studies it. I sniff again and wipe my eyes on my arm. The bruises are vivid, but they will fade. Mr. Freeman: "No crying in my studio. It ruins the supplies. Salt, you know, saline. Etches like acid." he sits on the stool next to me and hands back my tree. "You get an A+. You worked hard at this." He hands me the box of tissues. "You've been through a lot, haven't you?" The tears dissolve the last block of ice in my throat. I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle of sunlight on the stained floor. Words float up. Me: "Let me tell you about it.

Chapter One: The Dawn and the Dread Heartbeat, heartbeat comes from Valhallan way, To meet down in judgment, to ply its trade. Two →swords← to join in worthy cross, Actions to be rendered, one to be lost. She did come now from ’yond northern slope, A day of reckoning did she again once hope. A devout meeting was her qwesterly bane, To stay her hand was to go insane. St. Kari of the Blade to meet her past, A wicked enemy, peerless of match. Rode Kari she her charger on down, Past the Dead Land where Gaul sat crowned. A killing job, yea, she desired to lastly kill, To set things right so her heart might lie still. Upon the mist and roaring plain, She entered in, a soul uncontained. A fierce wind in deed, and forever freed, Enemies she annihilhates (’tis hur’ creed). Her own advanced guard of a sort, Multitudes to follow in her report. Know this Valkyrie from on cold, An ancient maiden soft and bold. A warrior spirit from Ages past, A fragmented mind like broken glass. Solid in stature this eternal framed being, Yet crippled within from internaled bleedings. A sword saint so refined in the poetic art, A noble character yet with a banshee’s heart. Rhythmed horse now to the beats, Kari emboldened amid the sleet. Beyond the mountain she does come, Unto southern fields wherein rules hot sun. Far from that murderous Deadlands ground, The land up swells; the dead still abound. Traverses she those bygones of leprous civilizations Those cities crumbled by the exhalted of oblivions. Stark traces etched now bare in the land, That are no more again, save dust in the hand. A cool stream now in desert sans (Does more good when one is damned). Stopped she her mount to admire the flow, A lovely stream with skeletons packed below. Blue air whisps; dragon flied motion. Flintsteel striking!!! Sparked of commotion. Cold water chortles rushtish with tint, Told of past carnage, it whetted her glint. Fallen warriors, they are no more, Swirls and eddies mark their discord. Gurgled shouts slung and gathered, Faces glazed while steel lathered. Refreshing though it was to her mouth, She smelled an air; she flared about. Came up that ridge of loud, sanded hill, Below a man and his half-score of kills. Kari’s eyes waxed in smug contempt, Possibilities ran deep with no repent . . . On Kari, Valkyrie, Cold Steel Eternity Vol. II

A Book of Glass On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to elisions. The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials. And I see a book in glass—the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be incomplete, after all. But I will make the book of glass.

American History from Rutgers University and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil. He lives in Columbia County, NY, with his wife and two children, who have perfected the art of reimagining every remote control as an iPhone and every Etch-a-Sketch as an iPad. An avid distance runner, Noah has completed four marathons. He actively

Spiritual traditions around the world, large and small, have two major gifts to offer: wisdom and beauty. Those who understand religion as truth etched in granite probably wouldn't make much of these soft benefits. For them, religion is about hard convictions and absolute correctness. But you can build a life on wisdom and beauty, cherishing insight into human experience and the glorious expression of that insight in art and craft. The first approach may make you crusty and inflexible, but the second may make your life beautiful. This is one of the main differences in the new personal religion: going deep rather than being right. This means studying your tradition and others that attract you and following them in your own way sincerely and wholeheartedly. The point is not to join the right group, but to find resources that will take you deep into your search and give you penetrating insights.

Drawings, as it has so often been said, are the most intimate expressions of an artist. They can reveal the very act of creation, a first idea, the first spontaneous stroke. They can tell much about an artist himself—for instance, that van Gogh in the south of France remembered an etching by Rembrandt, or that Picasso reinterpreted a composition by Millet.

Great sermon theses are powerful acids that etch themselves on the “have-tos” of the speaker. They are rarely written down. They don’t need to be. They have already been written boldly on the preacher’s soul.

Goya’s full motto for his etching is, ‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

Etching is not putting down lines, as someone, who cannot do it himself, tells you to, or as he does it, but putting down lines for one's self that will print, that mean something to others, others who can see.

Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind’s gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind’s self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation’s effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls.

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon’s public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind’s gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind’s self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation’s effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls.

I realize now that we were getting some dilapidated tail end of a noble art-teaching tradition from the prewar period—etching, stone lithographs, classes on the spectrum of light—all thrown away on advertising Gilbey’s gin. Very interesting, and since I liked drawing anyway, it was great. I was learning a few things. You didn’t realize you were actually being processed into some sort of so-called graphic designer, probably Letraset setter, but that came later.

Even if I am broken into many pieces, I know you can still make me a piece of art in another form; every scar will become an etching that tells a unique story

Art isn’t really about raw unmediated access to reality: that’s reality. You can get that at the bus station. Art is about interpreting reality, painting up certain aspects of, focusing alteration. Etching.

Venom by Stewart Stafford Thou art the Great Pudenda; The usurper king of Puck's Fair, Miasma ague, a goat's smear, From a reeking jakes' baited bear! Thou dost hurl thy feeble barbs, Witted pits 'gainst an impregnable bard, With dagger'd quill to etch thy epitaph, Far-outliving thy quarrel's shard. Toad-spawn at the gates of Hades; Cast out from its cursed ground, For the dunghill art thou fit, With its foul beetles all around. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

When I was a kid, every Christmas I would spend hours making my mom a present. One year, I wrapped her present up and put it under the tree. On Christmas Day, I handed it to her and she shook it and said, “Ooh, what is it?” (RICH LOOKS DEFLATED AND SAYS) “A picture of The Last Supper on an Etch A Sketch”’.

A STEADY STREAM of semiconductor inventions emerged from Bell Labs between 1950 and 1960. Some had arisen from Baker’s research department and others from the much larger development department. As a result, there were now a multitude of new transistor types and important new methods of manufacturing, such as the technique—resembling art etchings done on a minuscule scale—known as photolithography.

The scars of a survivor are art etched in the skin: a warrior’s tattoo, a triumph.

I look at my image in the mirror again, and all I see is the struggle to survive that is etched on my skin.

She hated religion as much as she loved its architecture. She detested the pomposity of its spiritual leaders, be they Muslim, Christian or Jews. Whenever she spoke to them, she was outraged by their confident certainty that they were right and all others were wrong, their self-righteousness, haughtiness and aggrandizement. The art and architecture of religion had been amongst mankind's finest achievements, but its inspiration had brought destruction to countless millions. Even the ancient artefacts she'd personally uncovered in the desert, monuments to humanity's earliest attempts to come to terms with spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, had been exquisite, but etched into their stone or marble were the blood and bones of those who believed differently.

With Suzanne’s command of line, soft ground etching was a fitting progression. It was the first formal art teaching she had ever received. Suzanne produced a series of nudes on Degas’s press, several of her maid, Catherine, drying herself by the side

After you told me about the shirt cuff, I told you about the time I spilled ink on a map in my father's study." He shook his head, baffled. "It was a rare two-hundred-year-old map of the British Isles," Merritt explained. "I'd gone into my father's study to play with a set of inkwell bottles, which I'd been told not to do. But they were such tempting little etched glass bottles, and one of them was filled with the most resplendent shade of emerald green you've ever seen. I dipped a pen in it, and accidentally dribbled some onto the map, which had been spread out on his desk. It made a horrid splotch right in the middle of the Oceanus Germanicus. I was standing there, weeping with shame, when Papa walked in and saw what had happened." "What did he do?" Keir asked, now looking interested. "He was quiet at first. Waging a desperate battle with his temper, I'm sure. But then his shoulders relaxed, and he said in a thoughtful tone, 'Merritt, I suspect if you drew some legs on that blotch, it would make an excellent sea monster.' So I added little tentacles and fangs, and I drew a three-masted ship nearby." She paused at the flash of Keir's grin, the one that never failed to make her a bit light-headed. "He had it framed and hung it on the wall over his desk. To this day, he claims it's his favorite work of art." Amusement tugged at one corner of his mouth. "A good father," he commented.