Art Quotes - Page 41

Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.

Julia Cameron

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Stephen Greenblatt

On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.

John Lanchester

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.

Oscar Wilde

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Paul Klee Foundation

Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.

Dexter Palmer

I know I will always be attracted to the unknown as it does often verify what I am or what else I could be.

Hollace M. Metzger

Most great artists define a new and unique region of hell.

Scott Miller

In art one idea is as good as another.

Willem De Kooning

WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES!

Carrie White

If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last act”.

Konstantin Stanislavski

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

Francisco de Goya

Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.

Paul Klee

This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn't know you, I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you."He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. "It's the painting of a dutiful daughter," he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. "You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you've missed something important. Does that make sense?"She thought, then nodded. "All right," she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. "You win."Julien grunted. "Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out.""And you'll know?""You'll know. I will merely get the benefit of it.

Iain Pears

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)

Martha Zamora

The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

Peter Shaffer

Pornography won’t be enough. Because it never is. Sooner or later, all niggers want to touch the real thing. All dogs want to smell and taste the true information. All artists want to make their fantasies reality. And everyone with a cock wants to use it to fall in love.

Peter Sotos

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters.- Gormenghast

Mervyn Peake

Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.

Paul Klee

Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.

E.A. Bucchianeri

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

William Saroyan

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white

Mervyn Peake

A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.

Ezra Pound

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.

Naomi Klein

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

Morton Feldman

You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.

Gary D. Schmidt

Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.

Anne Frasier

I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.

Juan Miro

O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

Steven Pressfield

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

Paul Auster

I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.

Misha Glouberman

Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.

Esther Verhoef

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

Marianne Wiggins

Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.

Arthur Rackham

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

Stephen Greenblatt

Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.

Stefan Balint

Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know, it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define, but there you are, right there, in the meantime.

Ani DiFranco

The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

Edward Gorey

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.

Hermann Bahr

Be yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.

Suzy Kassem

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.

Lawren Harris

Art’s only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality

Jean Rousset

A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together.One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.

Jasper Johns

Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altovini was saying, half with longing, half with delight, "These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds."In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living.

Mark Helprin

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

Dejan Stojanovic

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

Marc Chagall

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Jackson Pollock

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.

Walter Pater

An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

Shannon L. Alder

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

Patti Smith

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. ... Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. ... Make a drawing flow, stopping sometimes, and going on. ... Search for the simple constructive forces, line the lines of a suspension bridge. Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out. ... Have purpose in the places where lines stop.

Robert Henri

The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.

Neville Weston

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

Kakuzō Okakura

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde

Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.

Chuck Jones

Art is not in some far-off place.

Lydia Davis

In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.

H.E. Davey

One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora.

Samuel R. Delany

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Art Quotes - Page 41

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