John French Sloan
John French Sloan
John French Sloanwas a twentieth-century painter and etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known for his urban genre scenes and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often observed through his Chelsea studio window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth2 August 1871
CountryUnited States of America
Line is the most powerful device of drawing.
The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.
A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.
Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.
Think of drawing as a way of talking about the things that interest you. Think of those wonderful documents, drawings made on scraps of paper by the lesser Dutch masters while they were wandering around market places and sitting in saloons.
Study the great brush drawings of the Chinese and Japanese... When we try to imitate their conventions for perspective, form and texture we lose the content, because those artists were part of an ancient tradition. Our tradition changes rapidly, our schools of thought come to fruition quickly and decay again. We see differently.
Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.
There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.
Always think of drawing, getting the forms realized, emphasizing the design.
Drawing and composition are the same thing.
Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive.
Most art students are generous till it comes to squeezing their colour on the palette... Many pictures haven't become works of art simply because the artist tried to save a nickel's worth of colour.
Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.
In the work of Seurat, you can see the dots of neutral colors carrying the form and then the dots of more intense color that make the color texture. It is a totally different principle that than of the Impressionists who used broken color to imitate visual effect.