Edward Hopper Quotes

"Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer."

"Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

"What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint."

"My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature."

"If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county."

"After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface."

"Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world."

"I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions."

"I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds."

"I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums."

"I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me."

"I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking."

"I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it."

"I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use."

"If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary."

"If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression."

"In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people."

"In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period."

"It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method."