Art Quotes

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Repetition is the death of art.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Painting in watercolor is like walking a tight-rope; one must achieve a perfect balance between what the paint wants to do and what the artist wants to do, or all is lost.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explination.

If I've learned one thing in the 14 years I've been a full-time cartoonist, it's that you can not let anyone else define your professionalism. It has to be a personal ethos to which you adhere despite third party influence or acceptance. The old measuring sticks for professionalism are going away and now more than ever it's time for independent creatives to set the bar. Set it high.

Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for truth.

An authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

There is no better deliverance from the world than through art; and a man can form no surer bond with it than through art.

Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

One reassuring thing about modern art is that things can't be as bad as they are painted.

Our creations MUST be shared to be art, and the easiest way to share our art is to sell it.

I don't understand why people think everything has to have meaning. While painting the Mona Lisa did Leonardo Da Vinci intend for it to have greater meaning than a work of art that he made?

The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

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 believe in Art for Art's sake.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered, and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine mirror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner engraved on the back.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

What we play is life.

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

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.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

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.

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

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

All art is an imitation of nature.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way around.

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

What is art but a way of seeing?

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

All art is but imitation of nature.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Art is the lie that tells the truth.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

There are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, and a third which imitates them.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards -- in the life of an artist.

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge.

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

People can misinterpret almost anything so that it coincides with views they already hold. They take from art what they already believe.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he� for some reason� thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.

A painter is a man who paints what he sells. An artist, however, is a man that sells what he paints.

I don't work according to nature, but infront and together with it. An artist must observe the nature, but never confuse it with the art.

The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

One ought, each day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

All art is quite useless.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Everything you can imagine is real.