Top 60 Walter J. Phillips Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be content with nothing less than perfection.”

— Walter J. Phillips

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2. “Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.”

— Walter J. Phillips

3. “Aerial perspective has nothing to do with line, but concerns tones and colours, by the delicate manipulation of which an artist can suggest infinite distance.”

— Walter J. Phillips

4. “A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.”

— Walter J. Phillips

5. “Beauty may be perceived in any scene by one with sympathy and understanding. Beauty is in the mind.”

— Walter J. Phillips

6. “Drawing is the representation of form – the graphic expression of a visual experience.”

— Walter J. Phillips

7. “Any subject is suitable provided it is of sufficient interest, but the design must be very carefully considered, and plenty of time and thought given to its construction.”

— Walter J. Phillips

8. “Difficulties will assail you only when you lack in concentration and persistence.”

— Walter J. Phillips

9. “The student’s ambition should be to become a painter’s painter, rather than a popular painter. The approbation of fellow artists based on sympathy and understanding is manifestly better than the fickle or fast homage of the greater public.”

— Walter J. Phillips

10. “A landscape painting is essentially emotional in origin. It exists as a record of an effect in nature whose splendour has moved a human heart, and according as it is well or ill done it moves the hearts of others.”

— Walter J. Phillips

11. “The syllogism art for art’s sake refers to that kind of painting which disregards, or is contrary to, public taste.”

— Walter J. Phillips

12. “Beauty, pleasure, and the good things of life are intensified, and perhaps only exist, by reason of contrast.”

— Walter J. Phillips

13. “The beauty and wonders of nature are as alluring as the pursuit of Art, and made of me a landscape painter.”

— Walter J. Phillips

14. “It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.”

— Walter J. Phillips

15. “A horizontal or vertical line lacks energy, compared with one that deviates from either. The difference between these graphic expressions is the difference between movement and repose.”

— Walter J. Phillips

16. “Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.”

— Walter J. Phillips

17. “Etching will suggest subtle variations of tone, the most delicate shadings, all with black lines, which, as far as lines go, are unsurpassed for sheer beauty.”

— Walter J. Phillips

18. “A painter may be an abandoned mimic; at school he copies his teachers, which is only right, but he copies in turn every artist in town, which is not. He may do you that honour.”

— Walter J. Phillips

19. “The importance of colour is as nothing compared with that of form, chiaroscuro and arrangement. They are the true and enduring bases of pictorial art.”

— Walter J. Phillips

20. “I don’t like to think that I am a slave to technique, or so inept that I have to restrict myself to one method.”

— Walter J. Phillips

21. “The artist reserves the right to remove a blot on the landscape, to change positions of things, to suit his composition, providing only that he does not transgress the laws of probability.”

— Walter J. Phillips

22. “Many rules for the creation of colour schemes have been published in recent years, but, while they are popular in commercial studies, I know of no creative artist who employs them. They are, per se, restrictive; their use precludes any chance of adventuring in this interesting field.”

— Walter J. Phillips

23. “The most admirable method is that by which each wash of colour, large or small, is never disturbed. It admits of practically no overpainting, sponging or scrubbing. The colour stays where it is put.”

— Walter J. Phillips

24. “It is the incompetent and the neglected artist who charges the public with ignorance, stupidity, and indifference. He raves loudly, but he is incomprehensible, even inarticulate, in his work.”

— Walter J. Phillips

25. “Humility counts for much, but it may be that vanity does not dispossess that admirable quality.”

— Walter J. Phillips

26. “Rhythm is as necessary in a picture as pigment; it is as much a part of painting as of music.”

— Walter J. Phillips

27. “Appreciation is the breath of life to the creative artist, and in spite of modern conditions, there is enough abroad to sustain him. But his name is now legion; he competes with the dead as well as the living; and the rewards and honours seem attenuated by division.”

— Walter J. Phillips

28. “When technique is obtrusive it becomes mere mannerism, a conscious striving for effect. It is only a means to an end – the manner of putting paint to paper. It hardly embraces the expressive side of painting.”

— Walter J. Phillips

29. “It is the sense of unfamiliar envelopment that is impressive, whether in the living grays of hoarfrost, the crimson of the heavens at sunset, or the golden suffusions of autumn.”

— Walter J. Phillips

30. “Artists are perennially implored to consider ‘the limitations of the medium.’ Whoever invented this expression exaggerated the limitations of the English language. We are not concerned with what effects cannot be produced with our materials.”

— Walter J. Phillips

31. “When spring is here the sketcher begins to look over his equipment and relishes in anticipation the soothing hours he will spend in the open, warmed by the sun, fanned by the breeze, charmed by the manifold delights of nature.”

— Walter J. Phillips

32. “A mistake in drawing becomes difficult to detect when the eye is familiar with it.”

— Walter J. Phillips

33. “Submit your work to interested societies for exhibition where the critics in the light of their physical well-being and according to the extent of their knowledge, may appraise them conveniently.”

— Walter J. Phillips

34. “Take away a painter’s vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.”

— Walter J. Phillips

35. “Every successful painter has worked hard. He cannot rest after having gained a certain degree of facility in drawing, and expect to retain it. He must advance or fall behind. Without practice he will forget; his eye will fail him; and his hand will deny its master.”

— Walter J. Phillips

36. “There must be a judicious arrangement of all the parts. Considered conversely, the artist’s task is to fill his panel with a design that conforms to its shape and is beautiful in itself.”

— Walter J. Phillips

37. “The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged – not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist’s only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.”

— Walter J. Phillips

38. “Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult – so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily.”

— Walter J. Phillips

39. “Since art exists for humanity it is not unreasonable to assume that humanity has some rights in the matter. Who pays the piper calls the tune. An artist cannot be at once a rebel and a comfortable citizen.”

— Walter J. Phillips

40. “Realism is condemned by those artists whose poverty of technique does not permit them to express it.”

— Walter J. Phillips

41. “While sincerity and over-anxiety can spoil a picture, through superfluous elaboration and unnecessary correction, the carelessness that would leave it in an unfinished state is even more reprehensible.”

— Walter J. Phillips

42. “The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.”

— Walter J. Phillips

43. “Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.”

— Walter J. Phillips

44. “The deserving are not always blest. That peculiar attribute known as personality is as potent a factor as genius.”

— Walter J. Phillips

45. “Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky – what a travesty!”

— Walter J. Phillips

46. “Many of the old masters of watercolour painted from notes, with enthusiasm either unabated or renewed. It is hard to assume the same degree of concentration in the studio, but not impossible.”

— Walter J. Phillips

47. “However exquisite the contours or the colours of clouds, trees, rivers or hills, may be in themselves, they must be sacrificed if they do not conform with the general plan.”

— Walter J. Phillips

48. “Subject has the variety of life.”

— Walter J. Phillips

49. “Annoyance arises from the feared implication that we are copyists in subject or treatment, or both, whereas the common qualities that establish the relationship result merely from a similarity of method.”

— Walter J. Phillips

50. “Style is instinctive and few achieve it in a notable degree. Its development is not hastened by instruction. It comes or it doesn’t. It will take care of itself.”

— Walter J. Phillips