|
Art quotes,Writing quotes, Poetry quotes, Music quotes, Criticism quotes
[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp (1909 - 1979)
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947), Dialogues (1954)
Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925)
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)
Let each man exercise the art he knows.
Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.
Brooke McEldowney, Pibgorn commentary, 03-31-05
I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.
Charles Rosin, Northern Exposure, Aurora Borealis, 1990
Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)
Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.
David Cronenberg, Rocketboom, 07-19-06
The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.
David Cronenberg, Rocketboom, 07-19-06
If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington (1899 - 1974)
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E. M. Forster (1879 - 1970)
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond de Goncourt (1822 - 1896)
It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.
Elizabeth Aston, The True Darcy Spirit, 2006
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)
I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.
Federico Fellini (1920 - 1993)
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.
George Tooker
What I dream of is an art of balance.
Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), O Magazine, April 2003
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.
Isak Dineson, 'Babette's Feast'
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)
It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.
Jadelr and Cristina Cordova, Chasing Windmills, 07-11-2006
It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.
Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994
You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.
Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), October 26, 1963
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925), quoted in Bentley and Esar, Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951)
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong (1900 - 1971)
The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.
Louis I Kahn
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
M. C. Richards
Creativity is...seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.
Michele Shea
I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.
Miguel de Cervantes (1547 - 1616), Exemplary Novels (1613)
Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.
Nickolas Muray
Art has never been made while thinking of art.
Niko Stumpo, The Wooster Collective, December 2006
I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)
Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.
Penn Jillette (1955 - ), Interview in WIRED magazine, 1993
Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.
Piero Milani
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
Repetition is the death of art.
Robin Green, Northern Exposure, Burning Down the House, 1992
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams (1957 - ), 'The Dilbert Principle'
All art is an imitation of nature.
Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD)
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.
Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)
Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), The Moon and Sixpence
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.
Ward Jenkins, Ward-O-Matic, 03-23-2006
Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.
William Baziotes
Bookmark:
 Digg
 Facebook
 StumbleUpon
 Reddit
|
