Art Quotes - Page 39

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

How can you tell when a piece is finished?'I asked.'You can't,' he said flatly. 'All you can tell is when you can't do any more to it. And then you need to stop because if you don't, you will spoil it.

Mary Hoffman

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.

Ken Follett

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

Neil Gaiman

I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the important thing is the love that goes out from oneself.

Agnes Grinstead Anderson

Some part of me knew that I could play this part well, or better than well. But I was almost afraid to play it. The line between stage and life was so fragile here that I felt a risk of losing myself somehow.

J.B. Cheaney

And that, I guessed, was the aim of the Lord Chamberlain's Men: to serve up rich helpings of life to their audiences, to introduce them to people they would never otherwise meet, to stretch their minds and heart to fill a greater world.

J.B. Cheaney

It's ugly, but is it art?

Randall Jarrell

the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

Elizabeth Hardwick

This is the essence of Rembrandt's advice to Van Hoogstraten: the authentic craft develops naturally from one's own experience.So, it seems reasonable to suggest that the search should not be for the lost secrets, but for one's own practice. This is in fact easy, you start making things. At first they might not be perfect, but the information here should provide you with a running start. And, if you are cut out for this the learning curve will not be daunting, because you will realize that you are finally headed in the right direction: towards the living craft.

Tad Spurgeon

Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.

Hermann Bahr

I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I’m a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.

Shawna Lemay

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.

Don DeLillo

The notes I can handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is where the art resides.

Artur Schnabel

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about.

Mauricio Lasansky

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann

Form follows emotion

Walter Isaacson

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

Thomas Mann

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.

G H Hardy

I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

Max Ernst

Approach a great painting as thou wouldst approach a great prince.

Kakuzō Okakura

Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.

Anthony Burgess

The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.

John Gardner

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust!

Jennifer Egan

Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times

Robert A. Heinlein

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

James Baldwin

Carrie felt this as a personal reproof. She read "Dora Thorne," or had a great deal in the past. It seemed only fair to her, but she supposed that people thought it very fine. Now this clear- eyed, fine-headed youth, who looked something like a student to her, made fun of it. It was poor to him, not worth reading. She looked down, and for the first time felt the pain of not understanding.

Theodore Dreiser

I'm a peasantI'm the muzhikA pest you're destined to play the musicAnd yes it's pleasant to say it's beauty I'mIndebted to rest respecting it truly

Criss Jami

But maybe that's how it is with art. You suffer, and in the end, everyone thinks it's cool.

Tom Dolby

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

Robert Rauschenberg

gurl,if you were a flower I will plant you in heart,watering you with my blood and cover you with my body.

knight mayor

Art and life are seen to be rich and mutually enriching

Neville Weston

One must give himself completely to his art and not hold back. Throw caution to the wind. Embrace the muse. Make love to your art.

Harley King

practice makes better

Brian Lies

... food is not simply organic fuel to keep body and soul together, it is a perishable art that must be savoured at the peak of perfection.

E.A. Bucchianeri

It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.

Victoria Kahler

That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.

C.S. Lewis

drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnalround, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,within I am awakerepairing in dirt the frayed immaculate threadforced by being to watch the birth of suns

Frank Bidart

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

Pierre Bourdieu

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

Vladimir Nabokov

The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.

Jean Baudrillard

I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not "Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece" but "Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!

David Sedaris

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

Dejan Stojanovic

I'm never proud of my old work. I always feel as though my skills have since improved.

Criss Jami

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.

Robert Henri

Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.

Jim Morrison

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.

Pauline Kael

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Dejan Stojanovic

Magic is the stunning art of surprising your audience, so that nothing else surprises them.

Amit Kalantri

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.

Yukio Mishima

An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

Tom Bissell

Only after seeing the winter, do you comprehend the richness of summer. This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.

Martin Gayford

Art is my Life.

Olivia Sinaga

Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.

Martin Gayford

We always search for the signature of God to prove His existence. And now I say unto you that Art is His very signature!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

Rémy de Gourmont

The more successful the work, the more people will step in to try to influence and manipulate the work for their own benefit.

Michael Gungor

Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

Scott McCloud

He who wars against the arts, wars not against nations, but against all mankind.

Arthur Urbane Dilley

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Art Quotes - Page 39

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