Artists Quotes

When one's craft is rooted in strong relationship, he or she lures the into becoming a part of the show.

I do believe most curators - maybe I'm only speaking for myself here - want to be artists on some level. Curators must have an innate interest in what an artist makes. And they certainly have their opinions and criticisms, and the always ask, "How would I have made this, or how would another artist make this?

Stroud Marion Boulton

He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he couldn’t produce—he was as prolific an artist (yes, an artist, and I never use the term, especially regarding people I like) I’ve ever seen. But I could feel it. Everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made—was a payment, one he could scarcely afford; as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breath, and so the air became lead—silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick and malleable—into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child’s eye and a rocket scientist’s precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy, a quiet engine of sourceless shame and humility.When it came to another’s work, he longed to praise it but then couldn’t resist critiquing it all within an inch of its life, analyzing deficiencies with uncontrollable abandon and laser accuracy. He was sharp as his Radio 914 pen nibs, and as pointed.And then he’d apologize. Oh, he would apologize: Oh my GOD, forgive me, please don’t hate me, I’m SORRY, don’t listen to me, why am I saying things, what do I know, I don’t know anything, why do you listen to me you should just tell me to shut UP, I’m awful, forgive me, you hate me, don’t you? Tell the truth. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t. Please.

Chip Kidd

And in uttering thatExcellently executed truthYou become an artist too

Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

Annette Messager

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.

We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just...carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Georgia O'Keeffe

That’s what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks’ thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man’s way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds’ front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.

I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.

The first thousand are the hardest.

Don't separate 'real' life from 'creative' life.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.

Stephen Colbert

Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

Amy Reed

With the manipulation of abstract symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.

Jonathan Culver

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.

Darnell Lamont Walker

So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed?

After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.

Ambroise Vollard

Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.

Tom Gething from "Sabotage"

Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.

Darnell Lamont Walker

Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.

Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

Gustave Flaubert

The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What wedo with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.

Helen Maryles Shankman

I found that those friends of mine who welcomed the unseen into the realm of their seen offered immediate understanding. Some are Christians, some are not. Most are artists of some kind or other; artistry can extend to a way of being, of living lovingly in this world. Many seem to have almost a spiritual affinity for the unmarked trail, armed only with True North. ["Leap With Faith" Blogpost By Carolyn Weber — July 27, 2011]

So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives."-Jonathan Meese

Prestel Publishing

I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true.

Elizabeth Winder

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Sherwood Anderson

Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

Vincent van Gogh

Cherish your own emotions and never under-value them. We are not here to do what has already been done.

Artist Matthew Barney has made a film about “shit”. It is hardly original. Hollywood has made shit films for decades.

Don't listen to the politicians, always look at the artists, they're the first to tell us where we're going.

Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats.

Artists shows us what we blind to.

It's hard to explain your passions, but sometimes it is harder to live them.

Michael Lee West

I wonder if only artists can feel peace like this—such a gentle, inconspicuous peace that an ordinary person might not even notice.

Tessa Emily Hall

Some one has defined a work of art as a “thing beautifully done.” I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word “done,” and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.

Art does what reality cannot.

Jayme K.

Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.

He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters––not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists.

Before, I could only guess oh who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am.

Luhraw

Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are engaged in the arts should be the last to send any other message, because when artists endorse the traditional order of a society, it suggests that they have forgotten their own true role within it.

Daniel's desk by the window is piled high with his drawings. The artwork is everything. He thinks of himself as the act of drawing. His body of work is his life, it is his continuity. The drawings show outwardly that inner place where he is still alive, a thread to connect him with the world.

They'd lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room brawls endured for the brief heady adrenaline rush brought by the orchestra's overture and glare of white lights.

Michael Callahan

We are the next we.

Thanks to my art, I now know who I am.

Luhraw

Abstract is a journey through both my mind and my past.

Luhraw

We are the next us.

The suprematist must have a superior knowledge of understanding. With out that, their art is powerless

Luhraw

There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.

I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.

I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers.Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence.Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses!And I was all of them and yet all were not me.I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards.I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power.The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens.Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen.("Thirty Three Abominations")

Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his [sic!] time but most people are far behind theirs.

Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called "artist's world.

Muse

He's been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an art bum...

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