Artist Quotes - Page 12

• Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Fools Day, Finding Yourself

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.35, Shambhala Publications

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• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Beauty, Beautiful, Art

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• Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

  Winston Churchill

  Art, Military, Reading

  Winston Churchill (1961). “The Unwritten Alliance: Speeches 1953 to 1959”

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• An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

  Langston Hughes

  Inspirational, Black History, Doe

  Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Langston Hughes (1996). “Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories by Langston Hughes”, p.35, University of Missouri Press

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• I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

  Frida Kahlo

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dream

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• The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Inspirational, Hard Work, Perfection

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• Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

  Anish Kapoor

  Art, Creative, Architecture

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• The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

  Marcel Proust

  Stars, Eye, Land

  Marcel Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Dennis Joseph Enright (1992). “The captive, The fugitive”

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• Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

  Montgomery Clift

  Failure, Creativity, Creative

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• The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

  Georg Baselitz

  Attitude, Responsibility, Doe

  Georg Baselitz, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Amsterdam (Netherlands). Stedelijk Museum (1983). “Baselitz, paintings 1960-83”

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• When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

  Steve Jobs

  Creativity, Obvious Things, Best Job

  Steve Jobs (0101). “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, p.35, Prabhat Prakashan

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• Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

  Jules Feiffer

  Art, Stupid, Thinking

  Jules Feiffer (1963). “Feiffer's Album”

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• Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

  Theodor Adorno

  Inspirational, Life, Art

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso

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• Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

  Jackson Pollock

  Art, Different, Matter

  Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (1983). “Jackson Pollock”, Abbeville Pr

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• Artists are fiery; they do not weep.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Art, Fiery

  "Art, Literature, and the Drama". Book by Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1860.

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• Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

  Edvard Munch

  Color, Clash, Reconcile

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• Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

  John F. Kennedy

  Art, Creativity, Roots

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Magnum Photos, inc, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (U.S.) (1962). “Creative America”

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• 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.

  James Joyce

  Art, Invisible, Creation

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ch. 5 (1916).

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• Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

  James Thurber

  Art, Boys, Men

  Quoted in Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (eds) Selected Letters of James Thurber (1981).

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• Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Art, Pieces

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• I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

  Jackson Pollock

  Color, Drawing, Finals

  Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (1983). “Jackson Pollock”, Abbeville Pr

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• That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

  James Taylor

  Motivational, Art, Attention

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

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• An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Art, Men, Fellow Man

  Naomi E. Maurer, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (1998). “The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin”, p.17, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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• I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

  Jackson Pollock

  Littles, Painting, Figures

  Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (1983). “Jackson Pollock”, Abbeville Pr

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• I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

  Jackson Pollock

  Usual, Tools, Etc

  Jackson Pollock (2003). “Jackson Pollock. Englische Ausgabe.”, Kehrer Verlag

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