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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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There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir? and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.
-Roy Lichtenstein
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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
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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
-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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-Maxfield Parrish
Letter to F.W Weber, 1950, Published in New York
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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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Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
-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
-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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Books about Artist, The
