Merry Christmas

I hope you all have a good Christmas and New Year and thankyou for visiting the Fine Line Blog over the past year.

Barnes and Friday Street

"I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right."

(Alan Lee)

" It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes."

(Lauren DeStefano)

Syon House

"My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing, it's about making the best image iI can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can."

(Jim Dine)

"Drawing is a form of probing, and the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself."

(John Berger)

Florence

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of lifes longing for itself....

You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."

(Kahlil Gibran)

"All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with white carpets is one of them."

(Erma Bombeck)

Richmond Park

"For the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."

(Martin Luther)

"I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them."

(James Russell Lowell)

Richmond Park

"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."

(Michael Pollan)

"Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come."

(Karen Joy Fowler)

Paris

"When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn't find a whore in Paris, they were too busy paying their respects. That was a man-and he still has a show in the west end."

(Hanif Kureishi)

"At five o,clock Paris  always has a current of eroticism in the air."

(Anais Nin)

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)

"The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortals heart)."

(Charles Baudelaire)

Flossy, Pooh and Panda

"Love Children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us."

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

" Children are living beings-more living than grown up people who have built shells around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love."

(Rabindranath Tagore)

Wakehurst Place and Ripley

"Rest is not idleness, to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summers day, listening to the murmer of water, or watching clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

(John Lubbock)

"To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its features."

(Thomas Hardy)

Florence

"Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty days are now."

(William Wordsworth. 'To a butterfly')

"Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected."

(Louis de Bernieres)

Chenonceau

"The truth is not one of us is innocent. We all have sins to confess."

(Catherine de Medici)

"Courage is as often the outcome of dispair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to loose, in the other everything to gain."

(Diane de Poitiers)

Amboise

"I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but those whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will persue their principles into death."

(Leonardo da Vinci)

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

(Leonardo da Vinci)

Chinon

"What Family doesn't have its ups and downs." 

(Eleanor of Aquitaine-The Lion in Winter. James Goldman)

"It is my feeling that time ripens all things; with time all things are revealed; time is the father of truth."

(Francoise Rabelais)

Villandry

"After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you so much."

(Martin Gayford/David Hockney)

" Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know."

(Brett Whiteley)