Art Making Quotes

• To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Art, Practice, Soul

  "Finding Soul in LA: Five Creative Adventures in the City" by Roxie Sarhangi, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 18, 2014.

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• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

  Scott Adams

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Scott Adams (2007). “Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Explains Cloning, Blouse Monsters, Voting Machines, Romance, Monkey G ods, How to Avoid Being Mistaken for a Rodent, and More”, p.438, Penguin

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• When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

  Paul Cezanne

  Art, Flower, Judging

  "Is Cooking Ever an Art?" by John Mariani, www.esquire.com. January 17, 2012.

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• Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

  Edgar Degas

  Beauty, Dance, Art

  "The shop-talk of Edgar Degas".

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• Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Truth, Lying

  The Arts, May 1923

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• All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

  Sun Tzu

  Art, War, Believe

  The Art of War (6th century b.c.).

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• The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

  Robert Henri

  Inspiring, Art, Creativity

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• Expression is never considered a given, and it is in fact maybe not what's most interesting about making art. Making art, since 1960 or something, is many things: it's a way of doing philosophy, it's a way of opening a dialogue, it's a way of putting a fact or a question out into the world, or a way of drawing people into new relationships, or a way of interrogating history. It's all these other sorts of strategies or techniques or processes that are really interesting and really valuable.

  Kurt Ralske

  Art, Philosophy, New Relationship

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Of course, the process of curating is different from art making. Exhibition-making is a process that involves collaboration with various participating artists.

  Yasumasa Morimura

  Art, Collaboration, Different

  Source: u-in-u.com

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• If you take a flower to Mars, for example, the hostility of Mars probably won't allow the flower to live without oxygen. The process of being an artist, for someone who wasn't born in an arts-centric environment - I came from the Bahamas, where there's not a historic tradition of art-making, at least from the Western prospective - in a way is kind of an alien concept.

  Tavares Strachan

  Art, Flower, Oxygen

  "Tavares Strachan's desert explosion" by Matt Mullen, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 1, 2017.

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• Art-making is just another part of the consciousness industry.

  Hans Haacke

  Art, Consciousness, Industry

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• I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Art, Book, Reading

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• Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

  Andy Warhol

  Art, Business, Design

  Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Collage has been one of the most relevant forms of art making. It's resonant because it is made of the stuff that we see every day. It's familiar. It reflects our reality.

  Elliott Hundley

  Art, Reality, Stuff

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• When I get to the drawing, I really enjoy taking a big chunk of time and working on the drawing and nothing else. That allows me to make sure that I'm really challenging the art, making each picture as interesting as I can.

  Bill Watterson

  Art, Drawing, Interesting

  Source: bob.bigw.org

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• Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Art, Vocabulary, Knowing

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction.

  Raymond Pettibon

  Art, School, Advantage

  Interview with John O’Connor, www.believermag.com. December 2004.

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• I feel like there’s a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens. When I go to that space, I’m completely in this world of possibility.

  Laura Owens

  Art, Space, World

  Interview with Rachel Kushner, www.believermag.com. May 2003.

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• I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.

  Chris Van Allsburg

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  "All-star authors add stories to illustrator's vision". Interview with Christian DuChateau, www.cnn.com. November 11, 2011.

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• The hardest part of art-making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done-over and over-and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.

  David Bayles

  Art, Mean, Practice

  David Bayles, Ted Orland (2001). “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”, p.61, Image Continuum Press

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• Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting.

  Edmund Clarence Stedman

  Fashion, Art, Judging

  Edmund Clarence Stedman (1885). “Poets of America”

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• I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Jesus, New York

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• Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt

  Christian Boltanski

  Art, Telling The Truth, Felt

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• One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of status nullifies its fundamental aims; therefore at the center of my own adherence to to this ranginess in taste is that it doesn't add up to membership in a private club. The differences choose me. There are so many approaches, so many innovative moves, so many oddly shaped ears in the field; may they never sing in unison.

  C.D. Wright

  Art, Moving, Practice

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• This is what I call participation in the world of ideas. That is what art-making is.

  Bill T. Jones

  Art, Ideas, World

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