Paris

"He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing more tragic. Nothing is more sublime."

(Victor Hugo)

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans."

(Ernest Hemingway)

Merry Christmas

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home."

(Charles Dickens)

Have a good Christmas and a happy New Year and thank you all for checking out Fine Line.

Seville

"Only put off till tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

(Pablo Picasso)

" For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort."

(Aldous Huxley)

Seville

"A painter is a man who paints what he sells. An artist is a man who sells what he paints."

(Pablo Picasso)

"In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead in any other country."

(Federico Garcia Lorca)

Seville

"Thou hast seen nothing yet"

(Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

Love is a gypsy's child,

It has never, ever, known law

love me not, then I love you;

if I love you, you'd best beware!

(Carmen. Henry Meilhac. Ludovic Halevy)

Castlerigg, Buttermere and Kelly Hall Tarn.

"Drawing is the honesty of art, to draw does not mean simply to reduce contours: drawing does not consist merely of line, drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane and the modelling."

(Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres)

"Once paper, pen-and-ink-well have been brought to table, Victor Hugo sits down and without making a preliminary sketch, without any apparent preconceptions, sets about drawing with an extraordinary sure hand not the landscapes as a whole but any old detail."

(Charles Hugo)

Borrowdale and Honister Pass Cumbria

"I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever."

(Beatrix Potter)

"Drawing is the artists most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality."

(Edgar Degas)

Wasdale Cumbria

"When I first came the lake was a perfect mirror and what must have been the glory of the reflections in it! This huge facing of rock said to be half a mile in perpendicular height, with deep ravines the whole winded and torrent worn, except where the pink-striped screes come in, as smooth as silk, all reflected, turned into pillars, dells, and a whole new world of images in the water! The head of the lake is crowned by three huge pyramidal mountains, Yew-Barrow, Sca'Fell,and Great Gable".

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

"But to proceed with our survey, and, first of the mountains. Their forms are endlessly diversified, sweeping easily or boldly in simple majesty, abrupt and precipitous, or soft and elegant".

(William Wordsworth)

Levens Hall Topiary

"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long".

(E E Cummings)

"At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy of suffering in plants".

(Egon Schiele)