Art Quotes - Page 2

I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting.

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

Some things are meant to live and die with an artist

People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating.... I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration.... I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life.

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal...

A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.

Explore Art without a campus, it is fulfilling in the unknown.

The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it.

When the melody plays, footsteps move, heart sings and spirit begin to dance.

I think, Charlie, you have talent. I do. But I don't think you'll get far until you examine yourself and study.Until you let yourself be your subject. That's the exquisiteness of youth: you are allowed the luxury of vanity, of self-examination. Take it! Don't be ashamed of yourself.

What if your art could provide everything you ever needed or wanted in life?

Art is communication.

Wherever I wander off to, when I draw, when I paint, I get my life back. I am lucky that I am an Artist.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

An artist is one who has mastered the art of dissolving himself so completely that only his work remains!

What modern art required was an imagination drawn to possibilities, rather than braced by smug presumptions.

Orlando said it was important for scientists to have minds kept open by literature, and souls touched by the creativity of art.

No one can say if you are that person who, given good paint, good brushes, and a fine canvas, can produce something better than the factory man. That is, and has always been, beyond the realm of science. You do have the attitude of the dreamer about you. For that reason, I haven't the heart to argue anymore about this - it is a hopeless talk. And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances.

Life is an art the one cannot erase

On the canvas of life,Every sweep of the brush matters,Counts for something…

Conflict is much the same, injustice and inequality is nothing new to our generation only the contest has changed because not only that everyone has opinion but they also have an opportunity to voice it and that is a bit dangerous.

Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.

I remember growing up, saying you’re an artist it sounds pretentious but now it’s one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.

God always have a perfect way for every imperfect situations.

I wish that love could be broken down the way it breaks me down.

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

My motto for creat

Rare and powerful harmonies exist,Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.And thus do images of fleeting vision,Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,Once turned to stone live on from age to age,Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.("A Sonnet To Form")

I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.

Art doesn’t bare itself to just anyone, but to believers called artists.

Look at this charming donkey!

The beautiful is always bizarre.

wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

...it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone else into the same ridiculous mould. It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.

The self-esteem one acquires and a well-earned feeling of one's strength are the only consolation in this world. Income, after all, most brutes have that.

Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.

While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122)

It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?""Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

Do you know where your breakthrough begins? Your breakthrough begins where your excuses ends.

Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies.

Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional.

At a time like this maybe the world is looking at us not just at a miracle crusade or sunday church service but the way we are living. Maybe they want to see whether what our Master left for us worked for us; there is a counter spirit to the spirit of fear, it is the love of God.

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.

Up to four chauffeurs, two secretaries, two personal maids, and a masseur traveled with her to each home

(Ars longa vita brevis.) Art is long life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

Create something. Create something ugly. Create something beautiful.  I don't care what it is. Create it. 

The secret of good magic is another magic.