David W. Galenson

Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors. [Artistic Capital, 2006]

Paul Gauguin

Art is an abstraction as you dream amid nature.

Paul Gauguin

I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.

Paul Gauguin

Don't sweat over a painting, a great sensation can be rendered immediately.  Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it. 

Gauss

Jean-Léon Gérôme

How can the government dare welcome such a collection of inanities into a museum?  Why, have you seen the collection?  The state the ward of such junk!  The Luxembourg Museum is a school.  What lessons are our young artists going to receive there from now on?  They'll all start to do Impressionism!  (Writing in L'Eclair about Caillebotte's bequest to the French nation, 1894)

Charles Gleyre

Nature is fun to study, but style is everything.

Goethe

The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.

Goethe

Everyone hears only what he understands.

Goethe

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

Goethe

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life.

Vincent van Gogh

Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more.  Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her.  If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere. (Letter to Theo 1873)

Vincent van Gogh

I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
(Letter to his brother Theo, Letter 533, Arles, 8 September 1888)

Vincent van Gogh

To paint nature you must be in it a long time.  (Letter June 25, 1889)

Vincent van Gogh

I'd rather die of passion than boredom.

E. H. Gombrich

Art does not copy nature – it suggests it.

Antony Gormley

It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.  (The Guardian, June 23, 2007)

Clement Greenberg

The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

Pope Gregory I

To adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another . . . what scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant.