Artist Quotes - Page 2

I have a tendency to break rules and shake things up. I would say that with me people never know what is real and what is fiction. And I like that because reality is relative.

Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.

I make art when I can't gather the words to say.

Children need to see themselves in books. They need to see their gender. They need to see their color, hair texture, their disability, themselves. Picture books are like many children’s first introduction to the world. Seeing yourself is almost like a message. It’s saying, you matter, you are visible, and you’re valuable

My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.

Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.

You might say “no, you will never do that, that’s not you, not who I know, not who I thought you were”, and I will say "watch me".

The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.

...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

If you're not creating, you're disintegrating.

Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.

I have inflammation of the imagination.

As an artist, motive means opportunity

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting with the gift of speech

There is, perhaps, no more dangerous man in the world than the man with the sensibilities of an artist but without creative talent. With luck such men make wonderful theatrical impresarios and interior decorators, or else they become mass murderers or critics.

Don’t fear the future or regret the past but celebrate the present.

Mediocrity is Death.

Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun. I would, perhaps, rather come to you and your people, than to many rich folk who display inward poverty.

When an artist friend of mine explained she was working her way up the creative ladder, I asked if she would kindly paint the front of my house on the way up.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

The hours tick by as I lie in bed.Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

The creative journey is not a trek through the wilderness, but actually a clearly defined path, which though not visible to our outside eyes, can be felt with our inner senses.

It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill. ... The artist is the only free man.

I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced

Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

I have a fear of living a surface kind of life; barely existing, barely touching or tasting anything. That's why you'll always see me giving my all or walking away ~ I'm too full of depth to dance in the middle of anything.

I am an artist, and a rebel one at that. I live in the voluptuous dimension of imagination, so if you're expecting normalcy (dullness) from me, sorry to disappoint, but you're quite mistaken. Ordinary is not my best attire, I've tried it and normal just never fit quite right. I will always be the crazy one who believes in magic, unicorns and impossible dreams. But also love, compassion and empathy.

Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.

Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.

Where Norman Rockwell is the Artist for the man on the street, O'Henry is his author.

Your talent is a seed; cultivate it, and in no time, you will harvest success.

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'I inquire, why'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switchYeah make a way to face the music likeLife savings for a mosh pit riotListen to a mixRock the tickets, higher volumeVelocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot

Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies.

Maybe it's easier to conform, to stay in a job I hate to pay bills of the things I don't even enjoy and marry a man I'm not passionately in love with, whilst surrounded by those who have absolutely no life to their smile but I don't want easy. I never have. I want a life so fucking grande' I reach every little milestone in sweats or tears knowing I Followed what was true to my heart. I don't care if I walk alone for the rest of my days, if it means I get to stay true to myself.

You are the Poem I dreamed of writing, the Masterpiece I longed to paint. You are the shining Star I reached for in my ever hopeful quest for life fulfilled. Yes, I am Blessed.

Everyone who loves life is an artist at heart. Although it is sometimes difficult to love our world and our lot in life, failure to find the ability to love life and express appreciation for our world is tantamount to not existing at all.

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts...

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

Be a worthy worker and work will come.

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . .

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

As an artist suffering from insomnia and working from my apartment, I had an artistic freedom to explore and create awesome stuff. I wore a robe and slippers as my work dress code. These are the days when creativity is my best imaginary friend. And I was crazy enough to create what people would call masterpieces.

My childhood was a drag show!

Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.

Be an artist, see the beauty not only with your eyes but also with your heart.

I celebrate myself, I paint and dance and sing myself, and what I assume you will assume, for every atom as of me as good belongs to dreamy You. I am a song. I am a poem. I am the soil and a gem. I am a stargate and a voyage. I am the ocean and your soul.

You know it's ART, when the check clears.

A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.

Sometimes for the spectators a great magic effect is worth a life’s experience.

Your life is a movie. You are the main character. You say your scripts and act to your lines. Of course you do your lines in each scene. There is a hidden camera and a director who you can ask for help anytime up above.