If you look at the left-hand side of it there's a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things, it actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.

Nelson Shanks

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I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

Nelson Shanks

color real years

Realism has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry.

Nelson Shanks

laundry fake quality

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.

Nelson Shanks

boredom oil exercise

We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like crawling back because so many techniques are lost, and so we're going to have a [small] reserve of teachers who can teach the vast number of interested students. We have these poor, hungry, starving people who want to learn something and no place to get it. It's a tragedy.

Nelson Shanks

numbers teacher people

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

Nelson Shanks

pitfalls language art

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

Nelson Shanks

vocabulary artist real

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

Nelson Shanks

portraits presidential age

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

Nelson Shanks

painting bills careers

There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I need to be fairly straightforward. I'll just try to paint the man, his intelligence, his amiability and his stature, maybe paint him fairly close to humor and try to get it just right.

Nelson Shanks

games play men

Photographs and reality are just night and day. In reality, the information is all there. A photograph is just kind of a hint.

Nelson Shanks

photography night reality

I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally putting in music or literally putting in a musical instrument, I use only a hint of the instrument, but the brocaded pattern is like a line of Bach because of its order and the leaves going up are like passages from Vivaldi, and the emphasis on drapery is where the sound comes.

Nelson Shanks

musical order thinking

If you really want to seriously think about life, and therefore take painting very seriously... and take seriously the joys that it can bring to one, then you want to go to museums. You want to study the great of the past.

Nelson Shanks

museums past thinking

If I am using a sable, it may start off as an eight or seven, but it's a double aught by the time I'm done. I hate brights... they have no use. You might as well buy a filbert and take the scissors and cut off half of what you paid for.

Nelson Shanks

eight cutting hate

So really what I am trying to do is create and understand form. But then too, color enters into it because a lot of things are color changes without a value change, which wouldn't show up if you were just using a non-color medium.

Nelson Shanks

form color trying

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

Nelson Shanks

drawing

I try to think and design in color.

Nelson Shanks

design color thinking

Dramatic use of color, harmonious design, the interplay of light and shadow across a variety of textures, the portrayal of the figure and other subject matter that reflects the sophistication and beauty I find in nature - all presented from a unique point of view - can only be successfully achieved with a sound command of the painter's craft... history will determine how successful I have been.

Nelson Shanks

light unique successful

If you can see it, and if you know your color, you can paint it.

Nelson Shanks

paint color knows

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses.

Nelson Shanks

finding-yourself weakness technique

The reality is he's probably the most famous liar of all time, he and his administration did some very good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing completely out of my mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting.

Nelson Shanks

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