Top 40 John French Sloan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.”

— John French Sloan

2. “Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.”

— John French Sloan

3. “The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.”

— John French Sloan

4. “Don’t be stingy with your paint, it isn’t worth it.”

— John French Sloan

5. “When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.”

— John French Sloan

6. “In the hands of a master, light and shade is one of the great qualities of art.”

— John French Sloan

7. “Originality is a quality that cannot be imitated. The technique of the language, on the other hand, is something that belongs to all who can understand it.”

— John French Sloan

8. “Line is the most powerful device of drawing.”

— John French Sloan

9. “Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.”

— John French Sloan

10. “Don’t think of sea as color. Make it a solid that can support a boat. Think of ‘wetness’ as color-texture.”

— John French Sloan

11. “Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.”

— John French Sloan

12. “A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.”

— John French Sloan

13. “I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.”

— John French Sloan

14. “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.”

— John French Sloan

15. “The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.”

— John French Sloan

16. “Since we have to speak well of the dead, let’s knock them while they’re alive.”

— John French Sloan

17. “A piece of drapery is like a necktie, hot stuff to paint, and one of the easiest things for a painter to kid himself into thinking he can do. Don’t be fooled by the color. Go after the shape and character. Hew the forms together with colored tones.”

— John French Sloan

18. “Be sensitive to the qualities inherent in the medium. Paint honestly and avoid tricks.”

— John French Sloan

19. “Art is the response of the living to life. It is therefore the record left behind by civilization.”

— John French Sloan

20. “The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can’t get along without it.”

— John French Sloan

21. “Don’t be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.”

— John French Sloan

22. “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.”

— John French Sloan

23. “Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just ‘coloriness,’ color excitement. To think of color for color’s sake is like thinking of sound for sound’s sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.”

— John French Sloan

24. “Draw places you have seen from memory. I used to paint things I had glimpsed through windows while riding in the elevated train.”

— John French Sloan

25. “Sets of lines can say something about the direction and nature of the light. They are used by great fresco painters as a sign for shade.”

— John French Sloan

26. “Always think of drawing, getting the forms realized, emphasizing the design.”

— John French Sloan

27. “To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.”

— John French Sloan

28. “When painting a landscape it is desirable to walk through the clumps and around the bushes, around the trees, the houses and the rocks. Familiarizing yourself in this way with the subject, you will get a better concept of the thing and not a visual and false snapshot.”

— John French Sloan

29. “Have a special interest, a positive prejudice about some clump of trees or one particular knoll, an excitement about them can spread through the whole composition, and so fire the rest of the things that you are only mildly interested in.”

— John French Sloan

30. “There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.”

— John French Sloan

31. “You can be a giant among artists without ever attaining any great skill. Facility is a dangerous thing. When there is too much technical ease the brain stops criticizing. Don’t let the hand fall into a smart way of putting the mind to sleep.”

— John French Sloan

32. “Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.”

— John French Sloan

33. “Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.”

— John French Sloan

34. “Form your own color concept of things in nature. I have no rules for fine color to give you.”

— John French Sloan

35. “Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.”

— John French Sloan

36. “Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.”

— John French Sloan

37. “The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.”

— John French Sloan

38. “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.”

— John French Sloan

39. “Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time – condemned to painting for life.”

— John French Sloan

40. “Drawing and composition are the same thing.”

— John French Sloan

41. “Atmosphere in a painting is nine-tenths fear.”

— John French Sloan

42. “Draw with the brush. Carve the form. Don’t be carried away by subtleties of modeling and nice pigmentation at the expense of losing the form.”

— John French Sloan

43. “Find your own technique.”

— John French Sloan

44. “Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.”

— John French Sloan

45. “The artist seeks to record his awareness of order in life.”

— John French Sloan