The Nakedness of Woman

The Nakedness of Woman — a celebration of timeless beauty…

It’s a beautiful vision — the female figure. For as long as man has created he has immortalized the female figure into his art. Countless powerful and beautiful artworks have been created, along with stories told. More songs than anyone can count been written and poems are scattered across eternity. Beautiful women have been elevated to pedestal status and celebrated for as long as time existed.

In celebration, I’ve assembled a selection of great quotes about beauty and the nakedness of women, their role as Muse, and their eternal contribution to the arts. I’ve sprinkled a few of my paintings to express my appreciation for the muse in the best way that I know-how.

Enjoy…

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I have read that the ancients, when they had produced a sound, used to modulate it, heightening and lowering its pitch without departing from the rules of harmony.

So must the artist do in working at the nude.

Antonio Canova

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BEAUJOLAIS — painting on metal, 48″ x 36″ © A.D. Cook

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I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god.

Auguste Rodin

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Man’s naked form… belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.

Auguste Rodin

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The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is.

And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.

Auguste Rodin

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You miss a lot of wonderful as well as historic art if the nude is denounced.

B. J. Adams

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When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing.

I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.

Bill Brandt, photographer

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On Rigoberto Rodriguez…

It is not easy to sense, or catch, that fleeting moment when, for instance, a rock gels to feminine shapeliness precisely at the same moment that a woman’s beauty attains the perpetuity of stone. Only an eye standing permanent watch may capture the rich concurrence of two kingdoms of nature without slipping into the neighboring field of pornography. This fly on the wall is enamored.

Carlos Cesar Rodriguez

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Often a certain tenderness and love is felt capturing the nude’s special beauty and spirit in paint.

It is a romance with the subject and the canvas, and it’s very seductive.

Coulter Watt

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NIRVANA — 36″ x 60″, acrylic on canvas © A.D. Cook

Naked is a human commodity. Nudity is God’s art.

David Allio

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When women pose thoughtfully and artistically – in nothing but their bare skin – they find themselves.

They discover that they are truly alive. They become a Nude.

David Allio

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I remember trying not to disrupt everyone else in the room, fumbling around trying to figure out how to use the medium with a beautiful model disrobed in front of me…

Don Watson

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A pretty girl who is naked / is worth a million statues

E. E. Cummings

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Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience.

But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations… it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.

Edgar Degas

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Nudity is a problem for Americans.

It disrupts our social exchange.

Eric Fischl

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I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness… I haven’t the skill.

No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty…

Georges Braque

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The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with bones underneath.

Giorgio Vasari

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We must look for the pure essence of the human body and not the niggling details that sometimes clutter up the flow of form.

Harley Brown

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ARDOR — 48″ x 36″, acrylic on canvas © A.D. Cook

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The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning…

The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express.

Henri Matisse

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When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.

Henri Matisse

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The nude, if you tackle it, is a very fascinating subject, especially for a woman.

Isabel Bishop

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LUX — mixed media © A.D. Cook

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Traditionally the Nude was used to express formulations about life as larger-than-life, as Heroic or Ideal… The nude is not a ‘genre’ subject.

Isabel Bishop

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Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game.

If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally.

Jacob Collins

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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

John Berger

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SOLITAIRE — 24″ x 72″, acrylic on canvas © A.D. Cook

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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.

John Berger

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It matters not what kind of figure-pictures he [the artist] wishes to paint, he will never be able to draw the figure properly, whether draped or otherwise, unless he has gone through a preliminary course of study from the nude.

John Collier

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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

John Updike

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Art is about showing and seeing: to show that which is concealed, to see what was veiled, is fundamentally gripping.

Jonathan Jones

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OBLIVIOUS — acrylic on canvas © A.D. Cook

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Are Artists who create nude human forms getting ‘turned on’ while they create?

Our brains are in spatial-thinking mode and conscious sexual thoughts would get in the way and defeat the intention.

Kelly Borsheim

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O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.

Leonardo da Vinci

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When you draw a nude, sketch the whole figure and nicely fit the members to it and to each other.

Even though you may only finish one portion of the drawing, just make certain that all the parts hang together, so that the study will be useful to you in the future.

Leonardo da Vinci

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The problem with painting a nude… is that it deepens the transaction.

You can scrap a painting of someone’s face and it imperils the sitter’s self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.

Lucian Freud

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BROOKLYN — 40″ x 30″ on metal © A.D. Cook

A thorough understanding of the anatomy of the human figure in its ideal form is fundamental to relating to, and interpreting, our perception of the world.

Marvin Humphrey

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There is nothing as humbling as drawing, sketching, painting the human body.

Young, old, middle-aged, it is such a thing of beauty and wonder.

Mary Jean Mailloux

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Beautiful nudes made it possible for us to contemplate our sexuality in safety.

Martha Mayer Erlebacher

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Woman’s nudity is wiser than the philosopher’s teachings.

Max Ernst

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And who is so barbarous as not to understand that the foot of a man is nobler than his shoe, and his skin nobler than that of the sheep with which he is clothed.

Michelangelo

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He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture.

Michelangelo

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A painter is not intellectual when having painted a nude woman, he leaves in our minds the idea that she is going to get dressed again right away.

Odilon Redon

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The nude portrait is only incidentally about the naked person in the middle of the room.

Paula Brook

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I paint a woman’s big rounded buttocks so that I want to reach out and stroke the dimpled flesh.

Peter Paul Rubens

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ECLIPSE — acrylic on canvas, 36″ x 36″ © A.D. Cook

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I look at a nude.

There are myriads of tiny tints.

I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life.

It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?

Richard Corliss

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Men’s magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women’s magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies.

This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

Richard Roeper

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In the Nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene.

Robert Bresson

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Our bodies, apart from their brilliant role as drawing exercises, are the temples of our being.

Like the bodies of all fauna, they deserve both our study and our appreciation.

Robert Genn

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There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body.

Robert Henri

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BACKDRAFT — 48″ x 60″ on canvas © A.D. Cook

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When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it.

Robert Henri

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What is the body?

That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe.

Rumi

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Modern pessimism denies the intrinsic beauty and replaces it with a subjective vision that cares little for the objective truth.

In this thought the figure, whether nude or clothed, loses its form by putting more value on its symbolism than its actual form.

That’s when you need a Rembrandt to step in a remind us of the value of content in its relation to form and beauty!

Shane Conant

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The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.

Sir Kenneth Clark

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Something about the nude figure brings out the philosopher in me.

Sometimes I’ll add text as I’m drawing the figure at open studio…

I find myself writing thoughts from a different perspective that never would have occurred to me alone at home.

Theresa Bayer

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THESE DREAMS — acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 36″ © A.D. Cook

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The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

William Blake

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The undraped figure in nature has a beautiful outlook.

It is the important task of the artist to save the world.

To defend art from pornography means to defend art model from offensive image.

Pornography offends the model; art – never.

Art respects, arises, loves model.

Yaroslaw Rozputnyak

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