Art washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.

                                                                                        ––Pablo Picasso

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.        ––Henri Matisse

[Sun-bleached bones] were most wonderful against the blue –– that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.                                          ––Georgia O’Keeffe

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.                                                                     ––Madelein L’Engle

Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lives the freedom of art.  ––Albert Camus

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.  ––Ambrose Bierce

I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it –– pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers… only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.

                                                                                ––Norman Rockwell

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone and structure in the landscape –– the loneliness of it –– the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it –– the whole story doesn’t show.

                                                                                      ––Andrew Wyeth

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

                                                                                        ––Marc Chagall

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.              ––Andy Capp

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.          ––Andre Gide

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in art for art’s sake.

                                                                                          ––E.M. Forster

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)