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Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.
-Rudolph Arnheim, "Entropy and Art" (final words), 1971
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
-James Baldwin
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The man who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart! --this is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind.
-Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette
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"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
-Henry Ward Beecher
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The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it's something that theatre can do, but it's rare; it's very rare.
-John Berger
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I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten....
-John Berger, "Miners," exhibition catalogue, 1989; in "Keeping a Rendezvous," 1992.
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By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.
-Anne Dudley Bradstreet, The Prologue
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Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past:
I do what many dream of all their lives,
Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive - you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, -
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
“Less is more” is said to have been one of the favorite maxims of architect Mies Van der Rohe.
-Robert Browning, The Faultless Painter (Andrea del Sarto, l. 78, Men and Women, vol. 2), 1855
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"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."
-Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
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The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
-Albert Camus
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[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
-Al Capp
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May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.
-Paul Cézanne, Letter to Emile Bernard, April 15, 1904
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"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art."
-Marc Chagall
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"When one buys some of my artwork I hope it is because they will wish to learn from it and not because they think it will match their drapes!"
-Christian Cardell Corbet, 1997
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"Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else."
-Leonardo DaVinci
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People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.
-Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting and the Problems of Production, ch. 1, by Alexander Woollcott (1917)
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Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.
-Northrop Frye, “Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype,” second essay, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
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A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.
-Paul Gauguin
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It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
-Paul Gauguin
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"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."
-Paul Gauguin
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"Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."
-Kahlil Gibran, "A Handful of Sand on the Shore"
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Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
-Allen Ginsberg
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A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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“Now too we perceive to what extent the relation of art to truth must be a discordance for Nietzsche and for his philosophy, as inverted Platonism. Discordance is present only where the elements which sever the unity of their
belonging-together diverge from one another by virtue of that very unity. The unity of their belonging-together is granted by one reality, perspectival shining. To it belong both apparition and the scintillating appearance as transfiguration. In order for the real (the living creature) to be real, it must on the one hand enscone itself within a particular horizon, thus perduring in the illusion of truth. But in order for the real to remain real, it must simultaneously transfigure itself by going beyond itself, surpassing itself in the scintillation of what is created in art—and that means it has to advance against the truth. While truth and art are proper to the essence of reality with equal originality, they must diverge from one another and go counter to one another.”
-Martin Heidegger
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While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.
-Ian Hornak, "Cover Magazine", 1994
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“We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art.”
-Henry James
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Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
-James Joyce
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I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses.
-Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, pt. 1, ch. 22, 1903
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"On the contrary, art consists of inventing and not copying. The Italian Renaissance is a period of artistic decadence. Those men, devoid of their predecessors' inventiveness, thought they were stronger as imitators-that is false. Art must be free in its inventiveness, it must raise us above too much reality. This is its goal, whether it is poetry or painting. The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among volumes, lines, and colors. These are the three forces that must govern works of art. If, in organizing these three essential elements harmoniously, one finds that objects, elements of reality, can enter into the composition, it may be better and may give the work more richness. But they must be subordinated to the three essential elements mentioned above. Modern work thus takes a point of view directly opposed to academic work. Academic work puts the subject first and relegates pictorial values to a secondary level, if there is room.
For us others, it is the opposite. Every canvas, even if nonrepresentational, that depends on harmonious relationships of the three forces-color, volume, and line-is a work of art.
I repeat, if the object can be included without shattering the governing structure, the canvas is enriched.
Sometimes these relationships are merely decorative when they are abstract. But if objects figure in the composition-free objects with a genuine plastic value-pictures result that have as much variety and profundity as any with an imitative subject.
-Fernand Leger
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"Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness."
-Percy Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled
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"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."
-Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Arts
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"My inspiration is ART. . . Because without ART we would just be stuck with reality."
In 2006 Dan Lynch attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
On September 22, 2006, at 11:30 in the morning, Dan was walking with his school supplies in his backpack, when he was attacked and shot to death. He was 24 years old.
The Daniel Robert Lynch Art Education and Scholarship Program has been initiated to strengthen and assist art education…
[The] Program also provides two scholarships each year to graduating high school students to pursue an art education at a college or university of their choice. These students are from underprivileged families and would not be able to further their schooling without the assistance of a scholarship.
http://www.dansinspiration.com/mission.php
-Daniel Robert Lynch
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We dont like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. Well, art is art, isnt it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.
-Groucho Marx
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"Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is."
-Henri Matisse, Notebooks
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The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.
-Yehudi Menuhin
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The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
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"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
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"Un croquis vaut mieux qu’un long discours."
Fr., "A sketch is better than a long speech."
-Napoleon
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"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief – that it is not possible to live with truth, that the “will to truth” is already a symptom of degeneration.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art— an attitude all too rare at universities these days. Students who read Clark will be safely inoculated against the worst excesses of feminist theory, with its prattle about "objectification" and "the male gaze" — terms cooked up by ideologues with glaringly little knowledge or feeling for art."
-Camille Anna Paglia, From an article for Women's Quarterly regarding Kenneth Clark's "The Nude" (1956), 2002
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"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun."
-Pablo Picasso
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"Give me a museum, and I'll fill it."
-Pablo Picasso
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There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
-Pablo Picasso
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With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people—quite terrific to such, if they are capable of terror, and hateful to them, if they are capable of nothing higher than hatred… I say the first inheritance is Tenderness -- the second Truth, because the Tenderness is in the make of the creature, the Truth in his acquired habits and knowledge; besides, the love comes first in dignity as well as in time, and that is always pure and complete: the truth, at best, imperfect.
From: "An Inaugural Lecture," Delivered at the Kensington Museum, January, 1858.
-John Ruskin, The Two Paths
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"All art is but imitation of nature."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger)
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"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
-William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Beauty was darkness till she came.
Then paint her eyes, whose active light
Shall make the former shadows bright,
And with their every beam supply
New day, to draw her picture by.
-James Shirley, To the Painter Preparing to Draw M.M.H
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Art is the signature of civilizations.
-Beverly Sills, NBC TV, May 4, 1985
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...it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public...should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.
-Leo Steinberg, "Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public", 1962
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Opusculum paedagogicum
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
-Wallace Stevens, "Study of Two Pears"
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"I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific.'"
-Igor Stravinsky, "London Magazine", March, 1967
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"Painting in watercolor is like walking a tight-rope; one must achieve a perfect balance between what the paint wants to do and what the artist wants to do, or all is lost."
Source: Watercolor Bold and Free; by Lawrence C. Goldsmith; Watson-Guptill Publications; New York, 1980; p. 62
-Mary C. Taylor, Watercolor Bold and Free, Artist quoted in book, Watercolor Bold and Free
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I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
-Vincent van Gogh
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Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
-Edith Wharton
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life."
-Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Living, 1891
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It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.
-George E. Woodberry
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Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.
-Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937
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Books about Art
