Art Quotes - Page 2

It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

George Woodcock

An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.

I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value.

Kenneth Winters

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Art gropes it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods listening to itself and to everything around it unsure of itself waiting to pounce.

John W. Gardner

Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it.

Elizabeth Kilbourn

What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact which masks reality from us in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.

As an artist grows older he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.

Charles Burchfield

Art is I science is we.

The artist like the God of the creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork invisible refined out of existence indifferent paring his fingernails.

Designers and free lance artists and editors can set their hourly rates by dividing their annual income needs by 1000.

When power leads man toward arrogance poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist. . . faithful to his personal vision of reality becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

Conception my boy fundamental brainwork is what makes the difference in all art.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

George Santayana

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Clement Greenberg

Pioneers did not produce original works of art because they were creating original human environments they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them.

George Woodcock

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.

A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious individualistic unconventional sensitive irritable.

Robert Motherwell

Culture is something you cannot buy something you cannot import something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple enduring elements of everyday life elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

Ted Shawn

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

Modest Mussorgsky

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

Art is a delayed echo.

George Santayana

The object of art is to give life a shape.

I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.

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

George Santayana

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.

Vincent van Gogh

Painting is a faith and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Vincent van Gogh

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

Simonides

Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures - of these 3 000 are in existence.

Still there is a calm pure harmony and music inside of me.

Vincent van Gogh

Style like the human body is specially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.

Tacitus

The fingers must be educated the thumb is born knowing.

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

The scholar seeks the artist finds.

The song of the brush.

Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

John Cage

Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.

When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said "It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David."

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(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.

A work of art cannot be satisfied with being a representation it should be a presentation.

Jacques Reverdy

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

Ben Shahn

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

Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

G.K. Chesterton

Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists by definition innocent don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

Ned Rorem

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely.

Vincent van Gogh

Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.

Ned Rorem

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