Clifton Fadiman

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

William Faulkner

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Bartolommeo Fazio

A picture is nothing but a silent poem.  [15th century]

Anselm Feuerbach
(1829-1880)

If art copies life, then we have no need for it.

Conrad Fiedler
(1841-95)

Art is nothing else but a means by which Man conquers reality.

Jonathan Fineberg

Whereas in science one aspires to the simplest explanation of the phenomenon under scrutiny, the whole point of art and the humanities is to open our minds to more alternatives and ambiguities in the way we see the world.    [Art since 1940s]

Gustave Flaubert

The time for beauty is over.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)

A really good picture looks as if its happened at once.  It's an immediate image.

Helen Frankenthaler 

There is no formula.  There are no rules.  Let the picture lead you where it must go.  [Interview in New York Times 2003]

Helen Frankenthaler 

I had the landcape in my arms as I painted it.

Lucien Freud
(1922-2011)

The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own.

Lucien Freud

The National Gallery is like visiting a doctor, I go when I need help.  It's a resource when I'm struggling with a problem.

Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840)

The painter should not paint what he sees in front of him but what he sees inside himself.  If he sees nothing within, then he should not paint anything at all. 

Henry Fuseli

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

Henry Fuseli

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.