Best 22487 quotes in «art quotes» category

If you're not creating, you're disintegrating.

If your sad about your work then remember there are people who clean actual shit for a living

If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life--whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours.

If you think Robots can create Art than you don't understand what Art is.

If you've been fortunate enough to discover that the meaning of what happened to you is that you have something far more to offer than you ever imagined, you have to offer it. Bring it out of yourself and into the world. This isn't easy. It takes trial and error. You might find obstacles to discovering how an artistic talent can best be expressed, for example. Just remember that certainty you felt inside about how you were special. That's real. You have to let it see the light by doing something with it. And don't give up until you do.

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life.

If you want to have a golden signature, create a good art!

If you want to speak loudly or want to talk with everyone or want to taste what it is like to be immortal, speak through art!

If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

If you work by faith and not by sight, you will always see a sign. You have to develop a space of comfort to know that there is a difference between signs and sounds, it means God will tell you that He will make a change in your life but He won't show you anything to demonstrate the change for a little while because He doesn't want your faith to be in the change; He wants your faith to be in the promise, so that when the change is a bit slow in coming, you will know how to trust in Him while you wait for it to come to pass.

If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.

If you write then you are reborn because by writing about the moment, you can relive it for a second time.

I glance back at the painting of the forest. At first there doesn't seem to be much besides the shadowy gum trees. But if you peer a little closer it is dark and deep like a well with no bottom. Anything could be hidden there, if you bothered to look hard enough.

I grab the nearest lamppost when my knees threaten to give out, panting for breath as the words rip through me

I grew up watching my father make plates that featured penises as centerpieces. Pink, proud, and stiff, encircled by cerulean Greek key, Dad’s creations made me feel scared and small. I saw a private part of the man I could not measure up to. At six years old, I lived in a world shaded by his ceramic glazes. There was love and color, but anger, too, in the way he kneaded his clay, palms pounding the rich, wet earth into shapes of his choosing.

I grow weary of the love That lasts for a night When it should be there The next sunrise

I guess pencil crayons are like life; we hope to gain wisdom through our experiences, and sadly many of us learn important lessons later in life - however all that colour we scratched and pressed into our canvases create stories for our children, and grandchildren - things to laugh at as we look back, and hopefully things others can use as examples of lessons of caution, and tales of overcoming negative situations despite the overwhelming odds stacked up against us. Tales of past likes and loves, lessons learned, and the stories about how you met the right person and how you ended up with them - often a winding tale until there's an 'AH-HA' moment of enlightenment, lol. Tales of raw adversity...because rawness is beautiful, and learned wisdom which proves showing weakness is actual bravery. That not everyone you lose is a loss, and that in life, a situation will keep repeating itself until one learns their lesson. As sad as it is to see these pencils being shortened, and the way one tries to preserve what's left as they get shorter and shorter... the new box of crayons which will eventually be bought will continue the storytelling of the old, and add new stories until they themselves expire.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.

I guess the fact that they made something they could be proud of is more important than any prize ever could be. I can understand that. The beauty of the clothing itself is in the eye of the beholder. Judging art on a point system in the first place seems totally ridiculous! But since I grew up in such a competitive, point-awarding world, I wanted the grand prize more than anything. I wanted to be number one and get all the glory. Glory, huh... how stupid!

I had artistic classical training, and when you learn the classics for so many years, you might gain audacity, power and confidence to subvert everything. I am like the originals buffoons. I love the rules because I can break them.

I had a vision. I lay half asleep in the dirt. The sunset Behind the hills and burnt my skin. And in the dream I saw a throne--my throne, Built on the tower of my life. When I woke all I could think of was my Vision, etched so clearly on my mind. I worked for three days and three nights With no food or drink, until my vision Had become a reality--perfect in every Detail. I pondered the significance of this Edifice and shook off my trance.... I felt tired, I felt lonely, I felt confused, I felt so bloody confused, I felt like a right prat!

I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left there, I suppose after about five or six years, I then went to the other extreme and started telling to me what seemed to me at the time the ultra-truth about the world around me - social life, and the politicians, and so forth.

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.

I have a lot of, unfinished poems. And all of them are like, some love affair, that started too quick, and died too young. Each incomplete art to me, is like a memory lane, of an insane passion, that words, couldn't explain, and colors couldn't contain.

I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, "Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life. - from Hokusai’s ‘The Art Crazy Old Man

I have been thinking of light, the way it collected in the rain drops that morning I was so full of joy, and the way it shifts and moves in unexpected ways, so that at times this cabin is dark and cool and the next filled with golden warmth. Father spoke of a light that is older than the stars, a divine light that is fleeting yet always present if only one could recognize it. It pours in and out of the souls of the living and dead, gathers in the quiet places in the forest, and on occasion, might reveal itself in the rarest of true art. The entirety of his life was devoted to the hope that someday he would create a sculpture so perfectly carved and balanced, set in just the right place among the trees, that it would be capable of reflecting this light. He had seen it in the works of others, yet be believed he had failed in his own. I wish he could have known the truth. Just weeks after he died, I went to see the bear. It was the end of an autumn day, and as I stepped into the meadow, the light of the setting sun was cooling from oranges and reds to the bluer shades. He had never looked so alive; shadows dipped and curved along his outstretched claws, his fur and muscles seems poised for life, and for a moment, the sun just touching the horizon, the marble seemed to be formed of translucent light itself. I had no doubt of what I was witnessing -- this was not simply a flattering cast of sunset; this was the light Father had sought his entire life. The nearest I can describe is when Father took the back off a piano and showed me how a strong, clear note could cause other strings to vibrate without ever setting finger to them. He said the strings were resonating in sympathy to that pure sound. So it was within me. Shall I allow myself to believe in an immortal soul? If so, then I am certain it was Father's spirit that gathered with the divine light of the world and radiated from that finely carved marble. He always looked to his angels and gods and his Pietà. He never thought to look so near.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery.

I have forgotten the glasses, angles, color adjustments, contrast,blur and The photography..... The day the most photogenic person of my life went off my life. That person took my enthusiasm one feels at the moment of pressing the click.

I have grown or aged into difficulty in distinguishing between art and life. The reason may be that the difference is not always as neat or convincing as I used to think. When we make our art we are also making our lives, and I am sure that the reverse is equally true. When Jim wrote in one of his more recent poems that 'Light and dark became my sudden work,' so brilliantly using that adjective, he was talking about photography surely, but for me the line has a larger resonance. I hear it referring also to his long and arduous work of making his life by drawing it from darkness into light, and so making it whole.

I have felt so many loves so deeply: love of friends, love somewhere between friendship and romance that our society doesn’t define, love of art, love of life, love of death, love of language, so many loves such a multitude more than romance. Yet I have never been in a “relationship.

I have my priorities and I know my purpose. I do not Praise God because of my pain but I praise Him because of what the pain is producing.

I have graduated to the extent of not asking what is happening in my life because I trust the maker(God).

I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be.

I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business.

I have never found a book that stressed the importance of myself as a caretaker of my ability, of staying healthy mentally and physically, or that gave me an inkling that my courage might be strained to the utmost.

I have learned to thank God for what I cannot see, I have learned to trust God with what I cannot.

I have no sympathy with the belief that art is the restricted province of those who paint, sculpt, make music and verse. I hope we will come to an understanding that the material used is only incidental, that there is artist in every man; and that to him the possibility of development and of expression and the happiness of creation is as much a right and as much a duty to himself, as to any of those who work in the especially ticketed ways.

I have pretended to go mad in order to tell you the things I need to. I call it art. Because art is the word we give to our feelings made public. And art doesn't worry anyone.

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

I have the word of God and my bible is very interesting, this book was conceived in battle, Jesus Christ our Saviour was conceived in brokenness, out of barenness to redeem a people who were in bondage to their sin. I know exactly where to go when the people start getting confused, trading lies for truth, buying injustice for justice and even when the media starts to show me the prospectives of the world that I am living in, I have my prospective from the word of God.

I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).

I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad.

I head in the direction of the Eiffel Tower when I exit the alley, relieved to be out of the dark.

I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a colour? Colour is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering – like the susurrus of the wind – from book to book and object to object for tens or thousands of years, allow me to say that my touch resembles the touch of angels. Part of me, the serious half, calls out to your vision while the mirthful half sours through the air with your glances. I’m so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted. I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colours, shadows, crowds or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Wherever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. Have faith in what I tell you.

I hear you say: ‘All that is not /fact/ : it is poetry’. Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.

I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.