Painter's Obsession Quotes

Yes, Emilie Hornby, I'm here to tell you that I'm a little obsessed with you. With this... With us.

I had a cousin who neurotically made playlists for every walking moment of her life, and that slightly obsessive habit had rubbed off on me,

I am obsessed with the process of creation.

She’d been obsessed with the idea since Taylor’s version of Red came out,

I had a cousin who neurotically made playlists for every waking moment of her life, and that slightly obsessive habit had rubbed off on me to the point that I couldn’t deal with the harshness of reality anymore unless I rolled it around in music first.

You are so fucking pretty that I have a hard time not staring. Obsessively. Every second that I’m with you.

Wes was looking at her. "You know how I feel about weirdos." "Yeah, well, I don't share your fondness. This one sent me to the back of the boarding line for cutting." "No shit?" He started laughing that contagious Wes Bennett cackle and said, "No wonder you're obsessed. There's just something about a girl who hates your guts." "I'm definitely not obsessed," I corrected him, knowing full well I was still staring at Glasses.

Is that song about a girl obsessed with her neighbor?

I fell in love with you on Valentine’s Day, Emilie, but I need more than just seven minutes.” “I knew you were obsessed.” “Yes, Emilie Hornby, I’m here to tell you that I’m a little obsessed with you. With this. With us.

That was the sappy shit that I felt in my bones as I slowed to let a scooter zip past me. Because I was obsessed with the possibilities of this place.

No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.

I’d gone from finding her the most annoying girl on the planet to being inexplicably obsessed with her.

a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over.

She'd always assumed I was obsessed with love because I was hopelessly romantic. I never corrected her.

I’m here to tell you that I’m a little obsessed with you.

Colin kissed me like he was the hero in an action movie and our world was about to end. He kissed me like I was his greatest obsession and he couldn’t believe he finally had me.

I am the devil masquerading as an angel, a wolf cloaked in lamb’s skin.

The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment.

Of course a miracle may happen, and you may be a great painter, but you must confess the chances are a million to one against it. It'll be an awful sell if at the end you have to acknowledge you've made a hash of it." "I've got to paint," he repeated. "Supposing you're never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything? After all, in any other walk in life it doesn't matter if you're not very good; you can get along quite comfortably if you're just adequate; but it's different with an artist." "You blasted fool," he said. "I don't see why, unless it's folly to say the obvious." "I tell you I've got to paint. I can't help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly: he's got to get out or else he'll drown.

At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter. The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself. Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen! You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world. At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972. A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'? I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!" They asked me to play the record over and over again.

The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind,” he wrote. “The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.”44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind.”45 Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile.

The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange... All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world. This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both. The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum. What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact.

Funny how you never hear novelists or painters say they work in the 'creative industries', but only squalid little advertising people. How could this be? (.....) If you listen to advertisers, you'd think they're the fucking Oracle and that for a fee they'll slip you the Answer. They are obsessed with being seen as 'creative', but what they do seems rather to be 'parasitical' : pinching cultural innovations and using them to persuade people that they want stuff. So there's a dilemma for us all to think 'creatively' about.

The Romans’ ideal was torn between heroism and glory. Both are epitomized in the instant of death. To die ‘fine death’ was their obsession: to snatch that moment, to gather - carpere - the instant of death. Tiberius died from the effort he had expended at the age of seventy-three by throwing the javelin at a boar in the arena at Circeii. The moment of death isn’t just a subject for painters. It isn’t simply the stuff of the odes and annals. The moment of death exists in the amphitheatre: human sacrifices, bullfights, denudations, tortures and carnivorous scenes. The ancient Romans had taken over the ‘sport’ associated with the figure of Phersu from the Etruscans. The populus romanus gambled on the men who would be put to death within the next hour- The jus gladii - this is the Roman Empire (the right of the sword, the right of life and death).

This photo is classic aestheticism. The engaging expression, the loose dress and fluid posture. Early to mid-1860's, if I had to guess." "It reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelites." "Related, definitely; and of course the artists of the time were all inspired by one another. They obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty. But where the Pre-Raphaelites strove for realism and detail, the painters and photographers of the Magenta Brotherhood were devoted to sensuality and motion." "There's something moving about the quality of light, don't you think?" "The photographer would be thrilled to hear you say so. Light was of principal concern to them: they took their name from Goethe's color wheel theories, the interplay of light and dark, the idea that there was a hidden color in the spectrum, between red and violet, that closed the circle. You have to remember, it was right in the middle of a period when science and art were exploding in all directions. Photographers were able to use technology in ways they hadn't before, to manipulate light and experiment with exposure times to create completely new effects.

eyes. “It was a famous tragedy in Dutch history,” my mother was saying. “A huge part of the town was destroyed.” “What?” “The disaster at Delft. That killed Fabritius. Did you hear the teacher back there telling the children about it?” I had. There had been a trio of ghastly landscapes, by a painter named Egbert van der Poel, different views of the same smouldering wasteland: burnt ruined houses, a windmill with tattered sails, crows wheeling in smoky skies. An official looking lady had been explaining loudly to a group of middle-school kids that a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over. “Well, Egbert was Fabritius’s neighbor, he sort of lost his mind after the powder explosion, at least that’s how it looks to me, but Fabritius was killed and his studio was destroyed. Along with almost all his paintings, except this one.” She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but when I didn’t, she continued: “He was one of the greatest painters of his day, in one of the greatest ages of painting. Very very famous in his time. It’s sad though, because maybe only five or six paintings survived, of all his work. All the rest of it is lost—everything he ever did.

Alexandre Dumas, also in the audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets, painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done. Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—was more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.

You would think by now, I would’ve stopped making excuses for my behavior and just accepted the fact that I’m fucking obsessed with the woman and there aren’t any lines I wouldn’t cross when it comes to her.

In the beginning, I thought what I felt for you was just an obsession. And in many ways, it was. You haunted me, day in and day out. I ate, slept, and breathed you.

The crime on Darties’s list that feels closest to terrorism may be the 1996 theft of a portrait by Corneille de Lyon, a court painter during the reign of François I, the famously art-struck French king. It was François who purchased the Mona Lisa directly from Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, for four thousand gold coins, which is why the indelible work, created by an Italian, hangs in France.

Once or twice, Suzanne happened to mention the work of the recently deceased Alfred Sisley, and henceforward, the painter became Maurice’s obsession and his idol.

Looking into those eyes had felt like drowning, and it was then that I’d realized air was overrated. In the beginning, it had been obsession at first sight. But over the years, when other emotions, volatile emotions, came into play, I finally got a true grasp on what I was feeling. Love. It had always been love; I just didn’t recognize it for what it was.

Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

I could have the world’s best painter try to recreate what I’m looking at right now,” he began, those soulless eyes looking across my face, unbothered by whatever I had to say, “and he could never truly capture you as beautiful as you are right now, my little mouse.

In his essay “A Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire wrote that Guys’s earliest scribblings were so barbarian that “most of the people who know what they are talking about, or who claim to, could, without shame, have failed to discern the latent genius that dwelt in these obscure beginnings.” Latent genius. Baudelaire noted that for over fifteen years Guys taught himself tricks of the trade while still being true to his own vision and sense of beauty. Isn’t that the question for so many of us? How do we stay true to our original vision? How, as Ellen Gilchrist asks, do we “hold on to that native genius and also learn the things we need to survive”?

What, then, is this innocent painter’s special talent? Baudelaire describes Guys—and other such innovative artists—as similar to a child who possesses a ready openness and interest in surrounding things and people, no matter how ordinary or trivial. An innovative artist’s special talent is that very childlike sensibility meshed with the grown-up’s capacity for understanding and following through on a task. “Genius is the capacity to retrieve childhood at will,” Baudelaire announced. The capacity to retrieve childhood at will. Genius, like wonder, is an active trait, not an innate talent. You can track and foster wonder. You can create a new view of yourself and thus of the world around you.

A good painter has two chief objects to paint: man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard. —Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490)

Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.

I have often wondered why nineteenth-century French novelists were so often obsessed with painters and painting, while in the 1700s Diderot was the only writer of his generation to take an interest in art criticism. What a striking contrast that not one well-known novelist of the 1800s failed to include a painter as a character in his work. This is fair enough for Balzac and Zola, who had ambitions to bring every aspect of society to life, but read Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Anatole France, Huysmans, Maupassant, Mirbeau, and of course Proust, and you enter a world in which painting is surprisingly important. What is more, all these novelists explored not only how a painter sees things but also how he looks at them, and this produced a new way of writing. “I would just have liked to see you dismantle the mechanism of my eye. I enhance the image, that much is sure, but I don’t enhance it as Balzac does, any more than Balzac enhances it as Hugo does,” Émile Zola told his protégé Henry Céard, highlighting the visual nature of novels at the time. This was essentially a French phenomenon; it has no real equivalent in England, Germany, or Russia. In the United States, it was not until the end of the century that painting became a literary subject in the work of Henry James. In England, Woolf would be the first to write about the influence painting had on literature. Why the sudden, widespread interest in France? I believe that this new way of seeing and writing was facilitated by the creation of museums in France after the French Revolution. Frequent long visits to the Louvre gave a whole cohort of young writers a genuine knowledge of painting, a shared language with their painter friends, and a desire to enrich their own works with this newly acquired erudition. The visual novel dates from this period.

He swallowed and said, “Because you’re this fucking gorgeous sweet weirdo that I am obsessed with.” My throat was tight, because for some reason it felt like the most perfect love declaration I could ever imagine.

There is no rest for the wicked. Even in our dreams, the monsters come for us.

You’re my pet. My puppet. Something for me to break.” My voice drops, a venomous hiss. “I am a monster, and you’re just playing in the shadows. But I live in them. I am the shadows. I am death.

Knife Party” by Deftones pulses through the dimly lit room, its haunting melody the perfect companion to the symphony of silence that surrounds me.

There’s a strength in him that pulls at something inside me—a dangerous, aching curiosity. Will he break the way I did, or will he prove stronger than me?

Her body, carved with wildflowers, is beautiful. The flowers are quiet now, not angry or full of life like she had been. They are perfect—devoid of everything.

The real problem is that I need him alive. Not because I care, because I don’t. But because he’s mine.

All I’ve done since you walked into my life is lose control.

But tonight isn’t the night to reel him in. Predators like him don’t bow easily. No, they need traps—delicate sprinkles of sugar leading them to the water they so desperately crave.

My Thorn will be my first living toy, my masterpiece in motion. One that will see the true me, will understand the depths of my creation, and will beg to be consumed by it. By me. Darkness always wins. That much I’m sure of.

Because being beautiful is dangerous. And pain is power,