The Landscape Painter Visits a Museum
Today: a couple of quotes. The first is by Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, from his newsletter last week.
“If a brilliantly good artist happens to live just down the street, his top-up of your efforts may be hard to take. That’s why it’s good to check out dead artists. The dead guy won’t let you take him to dinner or tell you, ‘There’s something wrong with that mouth,’ as several of our subscribers did with my painting of Mel, but he can show you stroke by stroke how things might be. Cruising your eyes over someone else’s work in silence and with respect may be the next best thing to struggling on your own. Art museums help artists realize they’re never truly alone.”
“The way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.” (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)