Visual Artist Quotes

• Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Experience, Painting

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• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Funny Friend, Drawing

  "The Golden Book" Magazine, Vol. 7, (p. 323), 1928.

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• There is no must in art because art is free.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Art, Freedom, Painter

  Wassily Kandinsky (1981). “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, p.52, Library of Alexandria

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• I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.

  Bonnie McKee

  Fashion, Writing, Artist

  "Bonnie McKee, the Writer Behind Your Fave Katy Perry Songs, Talks Going Solo, Writing "Roar," and More". Interview With Mickey Woods, www.glamour.com. October 23, 2013.

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• I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind.

  Manuel Alvarez Bravo

  Philosophy, Eye, Artist

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• Visual artists choreograph dances for the eyes, guiding visual journeys in specific ways. But when presented with little or nothing, the journeys of the eyes become erratic and finally still their restless searching. The eye and mind and heart grow quiet, come to rest, and begin to understand their own functioning more deeply.

  John Paul Caponigro

  Heart, Eye, Journey

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• If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question.

  Richard Tuttle

  Thinking, Artist, Opposites

  "Drawing & Exhibitions: Richard Tuttle". Art21 Interview, art21.org. September 2005.

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• I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?

  David Toop

  Teenager, Artist, Choices

  "The Strange World Of... David Toop". Interview with Karen Shook, thequietus.com. June 28, 2016.

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• Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.

  Paul Laseau

  Reading, Writing, Creativity

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• Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Artist, Symphony, Trying

  "Why right-brainers will rule this century". Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.cnn.com. May 7, 2009.

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• As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

  Gavin Bryars

  Art, Writing, College

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• I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Artist, Car, Etc

  "Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein takes your questions". live.washingtonpost.com. January 11, 2012.

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• The most important thing to do as an artist is to get out of your comfort zone and work with different people: people who can't read a note of music, people who have incredible classical skills, blues and jazz musicians, pop artists, visual artists, dancers and actors. Learn from people who are creative in a different way to you and you'll keep evolving.

  Katie Noonan

  Art, Skills, People

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• At the age of 80, I'm becoming a visual artist. This could be my rebirth.

  Harry Seidler

  Artist, Age, Becoming

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• I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Garden, Thinking

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• I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

  Russell Banks

  Reading, Artist, Boys

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• As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.

  Del LaGrace Volcano

  Believe, Technology, Journey

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• But in the old days, visual artists used to fall into two distinct categories: those of us who created images with cameras and those of us who applied stuff onto other stuff, with brushes or other tools.

  Buffy Sainte-Marie

  Fall, Artist, Two

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• Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.

  Bjork

  Writing, Artist, Color

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Musically, it's difficult to believe Jim has only two hands and one set of vocal cords. You would think that there were a dozen of him if you closed your eyes and listened. From a visual artist's standpoint, Jim is a man of a thousand faces, all spellbinding.

  Jeff Mathews

  Believe, Eye, Artist

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• Mark Ryden is my favorite visual artist.

  Melanie Martinez

  Artist, My Favorite, Mark

  Interview with Jamie Taylor, concertaddicts.com. February 22, 2016.

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• Yes, a lot of European cinema and a lot of independent films and art-house stuff. She is a photographer. She is a visual artist and photographer and my dad is, too. My mum, I must credit for showing me good films. With my career, my parents were great and though they were a little wary, maybe, of the acting ambitions they have always been supportive.

  Mia Wasikowska

  Art, Dad, Independent

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Artist, Eight, California

  Source: artsmania.ca

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• Khairani Barokka is a writer, spoken-word poet, visual artist and performer whose work has a strong vein of activism, particularly around disability, but also how this intersects with, for example, issues of gender - she's campaigned for reproductive rights in her native Indonesian, and is currently studying for a PhD in disability and visual cultures at Goldsmiths. She's written a feminist, environmentalist, anti-colonialist narrative poem, with tactile artwork and a Braille translation. How could I not publish that?

  Deborah Smith

  Strong, Artist, Rights

  Source: thequietus.com

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• To me, as a visual artist, I don't want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well.

  Hiroshi Sugimoto

  Christian, Fighting, Buddhism

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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