ART QUOTES III

quotations about art

Art quote

We live in a world full of urgent problems: climate change, terrorism and poverty, to name but three. We won't resolve them with brawn; they are obstacles we can only overcome by using our brains--when we are thinking like artists and not behaving like animals.

WILL GOMPERTZ

Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life


Art as Magic is a forbidden and illegitimate pleasure, and ... what we are ashamed of wanting most are our wishful apprehensions. The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. Apart, that is, from the artist.

ADAM PHILLIPS

On Balance

Tags: Adam Phillips


One of the things pounded in to my head at the university level was that art is communication. So showing your art is not only good for your ego, but it's discovering you can be part of this conversation that has been going on as long as people have been painting in caves.

ROBERT LEMMING

"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016


There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

CHARLES DICKENS

Nicholas Nickleby

Tags: Charles Dickens, painting


The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Art should have political, spiritual, and surprising elements. It should try to find new language of communicating in order to give awareness to the public. Then every society can use the layer it needs at the moment. If one is interested in the political, they can take that. If the next one needs spiritual, it can be found in the same work. So if you just did one level, for example only political, it's like an old newspaper, you read it today and tomorrow it's old news. The art dies. Art with this kind of complexity has many lives where many societies can take something different at different times. It can live for centuries, otherwise who cares?

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine

Tags: Marina Abramovic


Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

JOHN BARTH

attributed, Writers Dreaming


Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

JEAN M. AUEL

The Mammoth Hunters

Tags: Jean M. Auel


An artist cannot fail; it is success to be one.

CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

Life and the Student

Tags: Charles Horton Cooley


Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"La Modernite", La Peintre de la Vie Moderne

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley, life


I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988

Tags: life


While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

RAY BRADBURY

preface, Zen in the Art of Writing

Tags: Ray Bradbury


Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.

JOHN BERGER

The Sense of Sight

Tags: John Berger


Art is memory's mise-en-scene.

LUIS BARRAGÁN

The Architecture of Luis Barragán


Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.

PAT B. ALLEN

Art Is a Spiritual Path

Tags: Pat B. Allen, truth


The way to art was not to think too clearly, not to plan things out, but to follow where your heart and emotions led.

PAUL PARK

A Princess of Roumania

Tags: Paul Park, emotion


Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"Marginalia"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe, soul


We are all artists. We just have to believe it.

WILL GOMPERTZ

Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life


Like most art students, I expect I'll find that there is no demand for what I've learned so I'll teach other students so that one day they can teach as well.

GUY BELLAMY

The Secret Lemonade Drinker

Tags: Guy Bellamy