ART QUOTES
Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish - Aristotle
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated. - Auguste Rodin
Art is art. Everything else is everything else. - Ad Reinhardt
The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting. - Alberti
Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define. – Ani Difranco (Out of habit), In Music
Art is what you can get away with. - Andy Warhol
I am a deeply superficial person. - Andy Warhol
PAINTING, n: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. - Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary", 1906
If the work begins to look labored or inferior, drastic action is taken. I destroy the offending painting with wild swathes of paint. Most satisfying! What comes out of this spent energy is often an excellent painting. - Ann Zielinski
The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live. - Albert Pinkham Ryder
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please. - André Malraux
Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. - Ansel Adams
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. - Ansel Adams
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. - Ansel Adams
I like to think that a good painting (or a good poem or a good book, or any good thing) can be measured by how much, after experiencing it for a while, you start to forget that it was made about someone other than you. - Andrew Hershey
In feature films the directory is God; in documentary films God is the director. - Alfred Hitchcock
[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. - Al Capp (1909 - 1979)
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. - Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925)
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. - Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)
Let each man exercise the art he knows. - Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.
"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity." - Alberto Giacometti
It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience. - Berthe Morisot
The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existense - Brett Whiteley
Art is the thrilling spark that beats death - thats all - Brett Whiteley
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none. - Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. - Brenda Ueland
I'm not really foreign, you know. I just do it to appear more sophisticated! I mean, nobody'd buy Evian water if it was called Blackburn water, would they? Nobody'd wear Kicker boots if they were made in Scunthorpe! Abba? Abba, Swedish? I knew then when they were a Lancashire clog-dancing trio! Arthur, Betty, Boris and Angela! Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn--a former pipe-fitter welder from Harrogate! - Balowski, In TV Shows/The Young Ones
An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way. - Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man"
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. - Charles Horton Cooley
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. - Charlie Chaplin
I build a painting by putting little marks together--some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts. - Chuck Close
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character. - Camille Pissarro
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly
"What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things . . . it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface." - Constantin Brancusi
Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them. - Constantin Brancusi
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. - Claes Oldenburg
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry.I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks. - Donald Trump
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. - Duke Ellington (1899 - 1974)
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can. - Danny Kaye
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. - Donald Knuth, In Technology/Computers
Arthur Dent hoped and prayed there wasn't an afterlife. Then, realizing the contradiction, he merely hoped there wasn't an afterlife. - Douglas Adams, In Literature
Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art. - Dante Gabriel Rosetti
I've lost the will to paint literally. I don't see the point in worrying away with a paintbrush trying to reproduce a literal photographic texture like cloth or skin. Paint is best at being paint. Paint can never be as perfect as nature when it is trying to imitate nature. It's a lost cause. Paint can only be as beautiful as nature when it is nature, when it is it's own texture. Marks on paper have their own beauty, and it is this slipping from the literal world into the world of abstract qualities that I try to achieve in my work. If I need a shirt to look like a shirt I'll scan it into my computer. If I want a shirt to feel like the wind, or like a constricting skin, or angry, or like a consoling embrace, then maybe it should be painted or drawn... - Dave McKean
It's only words... unless they're true. - David Mamet
When you risk becoming an artist, you risk taking your talent seriously. - Dee Ito
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. - Elizabeth Drew
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake. - E. M. Forster (1879 - 1970)
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. - Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do. - Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. - Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)
What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough. - Eugene Delacroix
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.- Edgar Degas
Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. - Edgar Dega
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people - Edgar Degas
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. - Edgar Degas
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper
A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? - Ernst Haas
Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets. - Edward Ruscha
Its hard to find the light when your born in the dark - Emile Zola
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. - Emile Zola
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love. - Edvard Munch
Little kids draw pictures of the ground, the sky, and space in between. If you ask them what the in-between space is, they say 'that's where we are.' - Ed McCullough
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.' - Edgar Allan Poe
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon
Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint. - Francis Bacon
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon
Kandinsky was right to appreciate Cézanne. The emergence of triangularity in the ‘Large Bathers’ was an unconscious step in the right direction, a step about to break through the crust of the future’s pictorial surface. However, agile and muscular as it may have been, Cézanne’s triangle could not shake the pyramid anchoring Raphael’s composition. The dogged perseverance of this pyramid illuminates the mystical dead weight which Kandinsky and all abstract painting following him have always had difficulty accounting for, and which in the end we, if not they, cannot live without. - Frank Stella
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live. - Frank Stella
I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle. - Frederick Franck, " The Zen of Seeing
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography. - Federico Fellini
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. - Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. - Georges Rouault
"...I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens." - Georg Baselitz
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings. - George Tooker
I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. - Georgia O'Keefe
Every great work of art is offensive to someone, for a work of art is a protest against things as they are and a proclamation of things as they ought to be. - Gerald W. Johnson
There are no rules, only tools. - Glenn Vilppu
There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "Autobiography"
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. - Georgia O'Keeffe
So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. - Georgia O'Keeffe
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. - Georges Braque
To explain away the mystery of a great painting-- if such a feat were possible-- would be irreparable harm. . . . If there is no mystery then there is no 'poetry'. - Georges Braque
They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it. - Georges Seurat
A great artist… must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. - Goethe
Art is long, life short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient. - Goethe
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
Art among a religious race produces relics; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade. - Henry Fuseli
All art is an individual's expression of a culture. Cultures differ, so art looks different. - Henry Glassie
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. - Henry James
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski (is there anything more perfect than "The Ethernal Husband"?). Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in van Gogh's letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of individual over art. - Henry Miller, "The Tropic of Cancer"
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" - Howard Ikemoto
Nature is a revelation of God; art a revelation of man. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. - Henry Steele Commager
The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette. - Henry S. Haskins
To be an artist is to believe in life. - Henry Moore
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hofmann
The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. - Heinrich Heine
It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else. - Henri Matisse
It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision -- a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage. - Henri Matisse
Precision is not reality - Henri Matisse
Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better. - Henri Matisse
Drawing is . . . not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods. - Henri Matisse
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter. - Henri Matisse
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. - Henri Matisse
. . I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so. - Henri Matisse
In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature. - Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.' - Hokusai, The Drawings of Hokosai
Great art is an instant arrested in eternity. - Huneker
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost. - Isak Dineson, 'Babette's Feast'
When this girl at the museum asked me who I liked better, "Monet" or "Manet", I said, "I like mayonnaise." She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder. then she left. I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me. - Jack Handey
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers. - James Baldwin
If you want to have a million dollars and be an artist, start with two. - James Bauerle
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. - James McNeill Whistler
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color. - James Mcneill Whistler
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. - Joan Miro
I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness. - Joan Miro
Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back. - Joan Miro
That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art. - John A. Locke
There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful. - John Constable, "Lecture"
Nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole - Jonathan Richman
Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket. - Julian Barnes
The painting has a life of its own. - Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)
Every good painter paints what he is. - Jackson Pollock
The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and an attempt to point out the direction of the future - without arriving there completely. - Jackson Pollock
Art is coming face to face with yourself. That's what's wrong with Benton. He came face to face with Michelangelo-- and he lost - Jackson Pollock
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. - Jackson Pollock
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. - Jean Cocteau
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. - John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), October 26, 1963
Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic. - Jean Sibelius
Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they are or people might think we're stupid. - Jules Feiffer
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. - John Kenneth Galbraith
Originality is something that is easily exaggerated, especially by authors contemplating their own work. - John Kenneth Galbraith
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. - John Ciardi
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you. - Joubert
The writer must be willing, above everything else, to take chances, to risk making a fool of himself - or even to risk revealing the fact he is a fool. - Jessamyn West
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes. - Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Northanger Abbey
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. - Joseph Chilton Pearce
Everytime I paint a portrait I lose a friend. - John Singer Sargent
Painting is a means of self-enlightenment. - John Olsen
How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art. - Kermit the Frog
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution. - Karl Kraus
While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the suffering of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high. - Kathe Kollwitz
My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. - Keith Haring
If you really want to upset your parents, and you are not brave enough to be gay, go into the arts! - Kurt Vonnegut
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. - Kurt Vonnegut
Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world. - Leonardo da Vinci
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. - Leonardo da Vinci
Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling. In our age the common religious perception of men is the consciousness of the brotherhood of man-we know that the well-being of man lies in the union with his fellow men. True science should indicate the various methods of applying this consciousness to life. Art should transform this perception into feeling. The task of art is enormous. Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion, that peaceful co-operation of man is now obtained by external means-by law courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspection, etc.-should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. - Leo N. Tolstoy
I just feel that I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working. - Louise Nevelson
Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind. - Louise Nevelson
I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid. - Lucien Freud
The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out. - Lucien Freud
The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. - Lucian Freud
I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do. - Lucian Freud
Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture ... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model. Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen. The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice. - Lucien Freud
An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himeself with his art - Lee Simonson
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of the pain we all have. - Lionel Trilling
Murder is a crime. Writing about it isn't. Sex is not a crime, but writing about it is. Why? - Larry Flynt
What we play is life. - Louis Armstrong (1900 - 1971)
Technique! The very word is like a shriek of outraged Art. It is the idiot name given to effort by those who are too weak, too weary, or too dull to play the game. The mighty have no theory of technique. - Leonard Bacon, In Art/Technique
Art is like a shipwreck .. it's everyman for himself. - Marcel Duchamp
Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count, because there is no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this, because it has nothing to do with him. - Marcel Duchamp
Art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as varacity, as truth. People speak of it with great, religious reverence, but I don't see why it is to be so much revered. I'm afraid I'm an agnostic when it comes to art. I don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's probably very useful for many people, very sedative, but as a religion it's not even as good as God. - Marcel Duchamp
I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products. - Marcel Duchamp
I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. - Marcel Duchamp
Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can only be explored by those willing to take the risks. - Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. - Mark Rothko
It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. - Mark Rothko
Great designers innovate, good designers emulate. - Mark Stosberg
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time. - Martha Graham
Talent and all that are really for the most part just baloney. Any schoolboy with a little aptitude can perhaps draw better than I; but what he lacks in most cases is that tenacious desire to make it reality, that obstinate gnashing of teeth and saying, "Although I know it can't be done, I want to do it anyway - Maurits Cornelius Escher
Drawing is deception. - Maurits Cornelius Escher
Lord, let me always desire more then I think I can do. - Michelangelo
Hear Peter Halley at the College Art Association conference, scolding academics for the jargon-laden obscurantism of critical prose, although his own writings on behalf of Baudrillard and the simulacrum thickened the stew more than a little. - Marcia E. Vetrocq, Art in America, In Art/Criticism
To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society. - Man Ray, "Self Portrait"
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation. - Max Ernst
I feel like giving up! - Max Liebermann
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others. - Mark Twain
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds. - Mark Twain
If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one. - Mark Twain
Criticism is a queer thing. If I print, "She was stark naked" and then proceed to describe her person in detail, what critic would not howl? Who would venture to leave the book on a parlor table? But the artist does this and all ages gather around and look and talk and point. - Mark Twain
You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus. - Mark Twain
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. - Mark Twain
My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water. - Mark Twain
Don't ask me what I want to express with my pictures, ask yourself, what they mean to you! - Michael Quack
The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. - Marcel Proust
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life. - M. C. Richards
Do not fear mistakes - there are none. - Miles David
Creativity is...seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God. - Michele Shea
Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back. - Ned Rorem, In Art/The Artist
Every painting is a war. You have to struggle every day, and to struggle every day with your inadequacies is a damn nuisance. - Neil Welliver
Art is the highest task and proper metaphysical activity of this life. - Nietzsche
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame. - Oscar Wilde
It is through… Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. - Oscar Wilde
The past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. - Oscar Wilde
The proper school to learn art is not life but art - Oscar Wilde
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. - Oscar Wilde
Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known. - Oscar Wilde
I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. - Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)
What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art. - Odilon Redon
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen. - Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Art is lies that tell the truth. - Pablo Picasso
Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds? - Pablo Picasso
I do not seek. I find. - Pablo Picasso
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. - Pablo Picasso
Painting is stronger than I am. It can make me do whatever it wants. - Pablo Picasso
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt. - Pablo Picasso
To draw, you must close your eyes and sing. - Pablo Picasso
If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint. - Mrs. Picasso
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. - Pablo Picasso
There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence transform a yellow spot into the sun. - Pablo Picasso
My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope." Instead, I became a painter, and wound up Picasso. - Pablo Picasso
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. - Pablo Picasso
I don't say everything, but I paint everything. - Pablo Picasso
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. - Pablo Picasso
The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution. - Paul Cezanne
Don't be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation. - Paul Cezanne
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. - Paul Cezanne
What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is in harmony parallel with nature. - Paul Cezanne
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty? - Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)
A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets. - Paul Gauguin
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. - Paul Gauguin
I shut my eyes in order to see. - Paul Gauguin
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible. - Paul Klee
The more horrifing the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. - Paul Klee
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel. - Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)
I am the primitive of the way I have discovered. - Paul Cézanne
Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also - Paul Cézanne
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it. - Paul Valer
Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision. - Penn Jillette (1955 - ), Interview in WIRED magazine, 1993
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. - Peter De Vries
White does not exist in nature. - Pierre Auguste Renoir
An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be the indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable. - Pierre Auguste Renoir
You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat. - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. - Rainer Maria Rilke
When I feel a little confused the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart. - Raoul Dufy
Art is a way of saying what it means to be alive, and the most salient feature of existence is the unthinkable odds against it. For every way that there is of being here, there are an infinity of ways of not being here. Historical accident snuffs out whole universes with every clock tick. Statistics declare us ridiculous. Thermodynamics prohibits us. Life, by any reasonable measure, is impossible, and my life—this, here, now—infinitely more so. Art is a way of saying, in the face of all that impossibility, just how worth celebrating it is to be able to say anything at all. - Richard Powers
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. - Rollo May, "The Courage to Create"
Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. - Roy Lichtenstein
There must be something about art... almost all cultures have done art. Its a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that. - Roy Lichtenstein
Since mechanically obtained randomness contains all kinds of possible permutations, including the most regular ones, it cannot be relied upon always to exhibit a pervasive irregularity. - Rudolf Arnheim, "Entropy & Art"
Life obliges me to do something, so I paint. - Rene Magritte
When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling… But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony… I go to great pains to mask [the agony]. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy. - Richard Diebenkorn
No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. - Robert Adams
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. - Robert Benchley
Every artist was first an amateur. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
Art is a jealous mistress and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the hear can imagine. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God. - Rembrandt
Art is a half-effaced recollection of a higher state from which we have fallen since the time of Eden. - Saint Hildegarde
The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad - Salvador Dali
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. - Salvador Dali
The difference between mediocrity and excellence is attention to detail. - Sebastian J. Barbarito
He who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery. - Sonia Delaunay
Life is not a support system for art. It is the other way around. - Stephen King
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. - Scott Adams (1957 - ), 'The Dilbert Principle'
Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form. - Stephen Nachmanovitch
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life. - W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
Life isn't long enough for love and art. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. - St Fancis of Assisi
What is written without effort is in general, read without pleasure. - Samuel Johnson
[Art] is about as outrageous and murderous an act a person can do short of really doing one physically. - Steven Wright, In Humor
I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums. - Steven Wright
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. - Stella Adler
Great art can communicate before it is understood. - T. S. Eliot
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. - T.S. Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent""
Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes. - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The big artist...keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools. - Thomas Eakins
You can never do too much drawing. - Tintoretto
In the staircase of life, Art is the only stair that doesn't creak. - Tom Robbins
My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. - Tom Stoppard
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memroy: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determinded, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them - with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul - pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangles. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colours, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE - Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto" - 1918
An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance. Almost dull, in fact. In reality, however, [it's] crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and [is] full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged ... It can contain anything but cannot sustain everything ... An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures. - Vasili Kandinsky, (1866-1944)
I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly. - Vincent Van Gogh
I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream. - Vincent Van Gogh
...dass in Wirklichkeit nichts Kunstlerischer ist als die Menschen zu lieben - Vincent van Gogh, letter #538 from Arles to Theo
The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech. - Vincent Van Gogh
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures. - Vincent Van Gogh
Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion. - Vincent van Gogh
What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. - Vincent van Gogh, "The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother"
The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting. - Vincent Van Gogh
There is no must in art because art is free. - Wassily Kandinsky
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. - Wassily Kandinsky
History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people, because they created. - William Morris
The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present. - Wyndham Lewis
People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy. - William Faulkner, In Frustration
Art degraded, Imagination denied. - William Blake, In Imagination
Once, after finishing a picture, I thought I would stop for awhile, take a trip, do things--the next time I thought of this, I found five years had gone by. - Willem De Kooning
In his lifetime van Gogh painted 486 paintings. Oddly enough, 8975 of them are to be found in the United States. - Werner Lansburgh
It's more fun writing bad books than reading good ones. - Werner Lansburgh
Normal is in the eye of the beholder. - Whoopi Goldberg
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying. - Woody Allen
I've decided, I'm going to feed every little addiction and silently go mad 'cause right now my writing sucks - Zaffel
Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.
If the world really looks like that I will paint no more! - Claude Monet, flinging away a pair of glasses for which he had been fitted to correct a severe astig
Garlic is to Food what Insanity is to Art - Anonymous, In Senses/Taste
First I saw the mountains in the painting; then I saw the painting in the mountains. - Chinese Proverb
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.
Imitation is the most serious form of flattery.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.
Art is work, to sell it is art.
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean that you're an artist.
When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artist to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn. - Walt Disney
Mark Rothko's paintings are.... "like television sets for Zen Buddhists" - Unknown
Vita brevis, ars longa, - Hippocrates