Originality...

Eugene Delacroix in his Journal, 15 May 1824

"What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough." *

Eugene Delacroix in his Journal, 14 May 1824

"The very people who believe that everything has already been discovered and everything said, will greet your work as something new, and will close the door behind you, repeating once more that nothing remains to be said." ... "Newness is in the mind of the artist who creates, and not in the object he portrays." *

John Constable in a lecture to the Literary and Scientific Institution at Hampstead, notes taken by C.R. Leslie, 25 July 1836

"The attempt to revive old styles that have existed in former ages may for a time appear to be successful, but experience may now surely teach us its impossibility." ... "It is to be lamented that the tendency of taste is at present too much towards this kind of imitation, which, as long as it lasts, can only act as a blight on art, by engaging talents that might have stamped the Age with a character of its own, in the vain endeavour to reanimate deceased Art, in which the utmost that can be accomplished will be to reproduce a body without a soul." *

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in his notebook, ca. 1856

"Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error; so listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling. Be firm, be meek, but follow your own convictions. It is better to be nothing than an echo of other painters. The wise man has said: When one follows another, one is always behind." *Goldwater

Paul Cézanne to Emile Bernard, 1905

"The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperment. Time and reflection, moreover, modify little by little our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us." *

Robert Henri in The Art Spirit, 1923

"We are not here to do what has already been done."
"I have little interest in teaching you what I know. I wish to stimulate you to tell me what you know."
"Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you." *Henri

John Sloan in Gist of Art, 1939

"Sometimes it is best to say something new with an old technique, because ninety-nine people out of a hundred see only technique. Glackens had the courage to use Renoir's version of the Rubens-Titian technique and he found something new to say with it.
     Cezanne may have tried to paint like El Greco, but he couldn't help making Cezannes. He never had to worry about whether he was being original.
     Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody. Witness Shakespeare and Rembrandt. They borrowed from the technique of tradition and created new images by the power of their imagination and human understanding. Little men just borrow from one person. Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.
     There are as many ways of drawing as there are ways of thinking and thoughts to think." *

Robert Motherwell in The Modern Painter's World, 10 August 1944

"The function of the artist is to express reality as felt.... It is because reality has a historical character that we feel the need for new art. The past has bequeathed us great works of art; if they were wholly satisfying, we should not need new ones. From this past art, we accept what persists qua eternally valuable, as when we reject the specific religious values of Egyptian or Christian art, and accept with gratitude their form." *

Keith Haring, in his Journal, Octover 14, 1978, NYC

"No artists are part of a movement. Unless they are followers. And then they are unnecessary and doing unnecessary art. If they are exploring in an 'individual way' with 'different ideas' the idea of another individual, they are making a worthy contribution, but as soon as they call themselves followers or accept the truths they have not explored as truths, they are defeating the purpose of art as an individual expression -- Art as art." *

Julian Schnabel, Interviewed by David Bowie in Modern Painters, Winter 1998

"It used to bother people that I never made work that was a form of signature, where everything looked the same. That was more, say, a quality reserved for sculpture rather than painting. Because painting was more like somebody found the irreducible image and kept painting that over and over again, and I just didn't have that hang-up." ... "...the idea of being at the beginning every time is the thing that has kept me young or fresh. Listen, Chris Walken once said, if you can't surprise yourself, how do you expect to surprise anyone else?"

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