Paul Valery

One must always apologize for talking about painting.  

Vincent van Gogh
(1853-1890)

Painting demands an intelligent model.  
[Letter to his brother Theo, August 1888]

Vincent van Gogh

When people say they [my paintings are] done too quickly you'll be able to reply that they looked at them too quickly.  
[Letter to Theo, 1888]

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 Theo, Letter 533, Arles, 8 September 1888]

Vincent van Gogh

I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in a motif, but for all that, I do not invent the whole picture; on the contrary, I find it all ready in nature, only it muse be disentangled. [Letter to painter John Russell]

Vincent van Gogh

Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.

Vincent van Gogh

To paint nature you must be in it a long time"  [Letter June 25 1889]

Vincent van Gogh

I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other . . . complement each other as a man and a woman do.

Vincent van Gogh

Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.

Giorgio Vasari
(1511-1574)

As long as art lives never shall I accept that men are truly dead. [Lives of the Artists, 1568 edition frontispiece inscription]

Giorgio Vasari

Paolo Uccello's wife told people that Paolo used to stay up all night in his study trying to work out the vanishing points of his perspective.  When she called him to come to bed, he would say "Oh what a lovely thing this perspective is!"

Hans van de Velde

The line is a force which stems from the energy of him who drew it.  [1902]

Robert Venturi
(born 1925)

Disharmony that comes from circumstances that are valid has tension, poignancy, quality, and beauty.

Voltaire
(1694-1778)

Common sense is not so common.

Voltaire

History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead.

Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant position, but certainty is absurd.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow   [New York Times May 24, 1999]