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Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.
-Hilaire Belloc
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To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
-Arnold Bennett
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In a certain sense every creative person is a reformer, but this does not mean that he must be in his work a propagandist for good roads, shorter hours, and a low tariff. All these are excellent things, but they need not be the concern of the artist.
-Heywood Broun, "New York World", August 26, 1926
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"The artist has one function--to affirm and glorify life."
-W. Edward Brown
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For the serious artist does not satisfy needs — instead he creates values. Values, to the world at large, have — alas, alas, and again alas — no value at all.
-Anthony Burgess
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
-William S. Burroughs
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In order to create, we draw from our inner well. This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well stocked fish pond... If we don’t give some attention to upkeep, our well is apt to become depleted, stagnant, or blocked... As artists, we must learn to be self nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them — to restock the trout pond, so to speak.
-Julia Cameron
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The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
-Joseph Campbell
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In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
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The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
-Marc Chagall
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"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
-Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student
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I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired . . . I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to 'see', like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occuring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground.
-Salvador Dali, My Secret Life
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Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.
-Edgar Degas
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The artist, a traveller on this earth, leaves behind imperishable traces of his being.
-François Delsarte, Delsarte System of Oratory
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The artist simply reveals, he doesn't explain. Freud tried to figure this out because he felt it very important to understand what makes a creative person tick. And he said that he had failed. In other words, I don't think that the artist is a scientist; he's almost the antithesis of the scientist. He cannot explain, he can only state. He makes a poetic statement, and the psychiatrist figures out why that is a universal truth. The psychiatrist tells people why they behave the way they do; the artist tells how they behave.
-William Eastlake, [interview, 1978]
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"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."
-Max Eastman
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Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.
http://rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&Itemid=210
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life - "Considerations by the Way", 1860
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In my prints I try to show that we live in a beautiful and orderly world and not in a chaos without norms, as we sometimes seem to. My subjects are also often playful. I cannot help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun deliberately to confuse two and three dimensions, the plane and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase? Can you be definite that it is impossible to eat your cake and have it?
[Variant translation: I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity.]
-M. C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher, “On Being a Graphic Artist”
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What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between...this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist.
-Federico Fellini
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Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
-Margot Fonteyn, Margot Fonteyn: Autobiography, 1976
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"In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world."
-John W. Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
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The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
-Paul Gauguin
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But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
-Paul Gauguin
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Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth – if you have any. Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.
-Paul Gauguin
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The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
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My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments.
-Ian Hornak, "The 57th Street Review", January, 1976
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What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images.
-Ian Hornak, SneedGallery Catalogue (circulated) 1976
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An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?
-Sebastian Horsley
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"The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it."
-Fernand Leger
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My role in society, or any artist or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
-John Lennon, Interview, KFRC RKO Radio, given the day of his death., December 8, 1980
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
-Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
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Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.
-Paul McCartney
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Behind every painting is a secret and inexplicable desire. Behind mine is this:
I want to make a painting that can tear a person in two. I want to make a painting that can make a person who has been torn in two whole again. I want them to be the same painting.
-Clayton F. Merrell, Artist's Statement
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The best artist has that thought alone
Which is contained within the marble shell;
The sculptor's hand can only break the spell
To free the figures slumbering in the stone
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
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This comes from dangling from the ceiling–
I'm goitered like a Lombard cat
(or wherever else their throats grow fat)–
it's my belly that's beyond concealing,
it hands beneath my chin like peeling.
My beard points skyward, I seem a bat
upon its back, I've breasts and splat!
On my face the paint's congealing.
Loins concertina'd in my gut,
I drop an arse as counterweight
and move without the help of eyes.
Like a skinned martyr I abut
on air, and, wrinkled, show my fat.
Bow-like, I strain toward the skies.
No wonder then I size
things crookedly; I'm on all fours.
Bent blowpipes send their darts off-course.
Defend my labor's cause,
good Giovanni, from all strictures:
I live in hell and paint its pictures.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnet
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"The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist."
-Novalis
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Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
also cited in Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist (1986)
-Georgia O'Keeffe, "New York Sun", December 5, 1922
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…How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place. For the most part the place is out of doors, for up in this northern wilderness when nature puts on a show it is an inspiring one. There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space, there is no such thing as sitting down outside and trying to make a “portrait” of it. It lasts for only a minute, for one thing, and it isn’t an inspiration that can be copied on the spot….
-Maxfield Parrish, Letter to F.W Weber, 1950, Published in New York—Pennsylvania Collector, August 8, 1991 (Gilbert, 235)
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All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superflous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.
-Pablo Picasso
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It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! ... I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
-Pablo Picasso
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When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you will become a general. If you become a monk, then you will end up as Pope.' Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso.
-Pablo Picasso
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The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
-Pablo Picasso
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Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
-Katherine Anne Porter
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To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.
-Auguste Rodin
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In reality, however, an artist is a product of art— I mean a particular art. The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet —and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius. The artist without art, the beyond-art artist, is not an artist at all, no matter how talented he may be as an impresario of popular spectaculars. The de-definition of art necessarily results in the dissolution of the figure of the artist, except as a fiction of popular nostalgia. In the end everyone becomes an artist.
-Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art
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In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
-Carl Sagan, Contact
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All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.
-Upton Sinclair
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"The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization."
-Jacob Getlar Smith
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Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
-Vincent van Gogh
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If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.
-Vincent van Gogh
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It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
-Oscar Wilde, from "Intentions"
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At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.
-Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, 1935
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The Artist, the free-flyer, the person that dares to be mad can always go back to that madness. You cannot corner that person. That person has an instrument, has a piece of paper, has a pencil, has two dollars worth of dime store paint, has some sand on the beach... That person can always go for Truth. You cannot corner that person. You can lock them in solitary and they'll scratch it on the wall, and if you cut off their hands, they will scratch it in their mind.
-Wulf Zendik
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"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."
-Emile Zola
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There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
-Emile Zola
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I am an artist. I am here to live out loud.
-Emile Zola
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Books about Artist, The
