Quotes by Painters - Page 10

Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
Malcolm de Chazal
Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.
Bruno Schulz
As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.
Jasper Johns
The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.
Wyndham Lewis
It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government!' The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.""It has been going on for years," I said. "And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.""Men are very difficult to understand," said Carmella. "Let's hope they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen, and parliaments.
Leonora Carrington
It took me a lifetime.
Pablo Picasso
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
John Berger
Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.
Diego Rivera
El Sueno de la razon produce monstrous. (The sleep of reason breeds monsters)
Francisco de Goya
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.
Robert Henri
It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.
Mark Rothko
I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Claude Monet
The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.
Henri Matisse
Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation
Robert Motherwell
A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.
Robert Henri
..it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.
Vincent van Gogh
Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.
Robert Henri
Cubism is a Cathedral of shit.
Francis Picabia
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.
Constantin Brancusi
The artist must be blind to "recognized" and "unrecognized" form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity.
Wassily Kandinsky
Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.
Richard Diebenkorn
There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.
Edouard Manet
They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers—just to upset the critics.
Bob Ross
Take on the challenge and find inspiration in the process.
Stefan Baumann
I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as ons is forced to think.
Vanessa Bell
I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as one is forced to think.
Vanessa Bell
The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.
Henri Matisse
a politician is an arse uponwhich everyone has sat except a man
E.E. Cummings
I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
Henry Miller
What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.
Natalie Goldberg
I wish I had another chance to write that school composition, 'What I Did Last Summer.' When I wrote it in fifth grade, I was scared and just recorded: 'It was interesting. It was nice. My summer was fun.' I snuck through with a B grade. But I still wondered, How do you really do that? Now it is obvious. You tell the truth and you depict it in detail: 'My mother dyed her hair red and polished her toenails silver. I was mad for Parcheesi and running the sprinkler catching beetles in a mason jar and feeding them grass. My father sat at the kitchen table a lot staring straight ahead, never talking, a Budweiser in his hand.
Natalie Goldberg
Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.
Natalie Goldberg
Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are."...If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need.
Natalie Goldberg
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Regret and remorse” is a dialectic issue about what has been done, about what should have been done and about what should not have been done. ( “Island of regret. Island of remorse” )
Erik Pevernagie
When the bonfire of love still smolders in the wake of emotional convulsions, seeds of regret and remorse may endlessly linger about on the path of life. ("Taken for a ride)
Erik Pevernagie
I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.
Henry Miller
I think anything like that-which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone-people always feel sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?
Andrew Wyeth
Love is like a musical score, sometimes very tuneful, creating a harmony of sounds, sometimes extremely harsh, striking a hell of false notes. (“Love lying fallow “)
Erik Pevernagie
I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.
William Blake
I saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything.
Henry Miller
It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.This is surely the death of all thought.This quote is taken from "The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7.
Mark Rothko
No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.
Rabih Alameddine
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.
Henry Miller
You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.
Françoise Gilot
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit
E.E. Cummings
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
William Blake
Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,while the oppression and the shame still last;not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;so do not wake me, hush! keep your voice down.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather bedding rising out of the night.
Bruno Schulz
The cashier had long since left for home. By now she was probably bustling by an unmade bed that was waiting in her small room like a boat to carry her off to the black lagoons of sleep, into the complicated world of dreams. The person sitting in the box office was only a wraith, an illusory phantom looking with tired, heavily made-up eyes at the empyiness of light, fluttering her lashes thoughtlessly to disperse the golden dust of drowsiness scattered by the elctric bulbs.
Bruno Schulz
A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.
Henry Miller
Sacrifices are no sacrifices when they are repaid a thousand fold.
William Hazlitt
I look at youAcross those fires and the dark.
Weldon Kees
For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure,the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. Totell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hotturds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if hislivelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.
Henry Miller
A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness. In fact, he creates new appearances of things.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego Rivera
Vision is the end of religion.
William Blake
If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!
Pablo Picasso
The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
Leonora Carrington