"Shadows which you see with difficulty, and..." - Quote by Leonardo Da Vinci
Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.
More by Leonardo Da Vinci
“If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.”
“Music cannot be called otherwise than the sister of painting, for she is dependent upon hearing, a sense second to sight, and her harmony is composed of the union of its proportional parts sounded simultaneously, rising and falling in one or more harmonic rhythms.”
“The body of the earth is of the nature of a fish... because it draws water as its breath instead of air.”
More on Art
“I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.”
“The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.”
“I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.”
More on Painting
“While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.”
“I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.”
“I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”