Kimon Nicolaides Quotes

The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them.

Man can make only the rules. He cannot make the laws, which are the laws of nature. It is the understanding of these laws that enables a student to draw.

There is only one right way to draw... physical contact with all sorts of objects through all the senses.

You cannot govern the creative impulse; all you can do is eliminate obstacles and smooth the way for it.

Committing oneself to a technique causes stagnation.

To understand theory is not enough. Much practice is necessary.

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot separate technique from expression. There is only expression.

You should draw not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing... Gesture has no precise edges, no forms. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space.

Art should be concerned more with life than with art.

When we use numbers we are using symbols, and it is only when we transfer them to life that they become actualities. The same is true with drawing and painting. They are to be learned, not as rules, but as actualities. Then the rules become appropriate.

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see - to see correctly - and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.

Merely to see... is not enough. It is necessary to have a fresh, vivid, physical contact with the object you draw through as many of the senses as possible - and especially through the sense of touch.

There is no such thing as starting where Cezanne left off. You have to start where he started... at the beginning.

All that you need in the way of technique for drawing is bound up in the technique of seeing - that is, of understanding, which after all is mainly dependent on feeling. If you attempt to see in the way prescribed by any mechanical system of drawing, old or new, you will lose the understanding of the fundamental impulse. Your drawing becomes a meaningless diagram and the time so spent is wasted.

You are not to think of painting as something separate from drawing.