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Michael Ayrton Quotes

The process of drawing is... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator

The process of drawing is... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication.

Michael Ayrton
Communication, Artist, Drawing
Michael Ayrton (1962). “Drawing and Sculpture”

Pride is a wound and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open that wound again and again. Among men it seldom heals and often grows septic.

Michael Ayrton
Pride, Men, Vanity
"The Maze Maker: A Novel".

Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation.

Michael Ayrton
Art, Metaphor, Depiction
Michael Ayrton (1971). “The Rudiments of Paradise: Various Essays on Various Arts”

About the fearful sphere which we inhabit, whose centre may be calculated and whose circumference is physically established, there spin metaphors whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference shows itself only through holes in the dark.

Michael Ayrton
Dark, Earth, May
Michael Ayrton (1971). “The Rudiments of Paradise: Various Essays on Various Arts”

Michelangelo's contemporaries thought him the greatest artist who ever lived and called him 'divine.' His reputation as sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman has not subsequently been surpassed, and who is to say his contemporaries were wrong?

Michael Ayrton
Artist, Reputation, Architect

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