Artist Quotes

Broken pencils still write beautiful songs.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies.

Aristotle

When one admires an artist it is important not to know him personally.

Jacinto Benaventey Martinez

Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.

The artist like the idiot or clown sits on the edge of the world and a push may send him over it.

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

Art isn't something you marry it's something you rape.

It's not what you see that is art art is the gap.

I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.

John Murray Gibbon

An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.

Art upsets science reassures.

An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

The father of every good work is discontent and its mother is diligence.

A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.

The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect.

Martin Greenburg

Drawing is speaking to the eye talking is painting to the ear.

We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

Caricature is rough truth.

George Meredith

A work of art is an exaggeration.

One must work nothing but work and one must have patience.

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

Paul Klee

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

Paul Klee

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

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

Art is man's nature nature is God's art.

With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

If you ask me what I came to do in this world I an artist I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.'

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

Kenneth Boulding

The cheap no matter how charming how immediate does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through.

William Littler

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

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.

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