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Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish - Aristotle
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated. - Auguste Rodin
Art is art. Everything else is everything else. - Ad Reinhardt
The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting. - Alberti
Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define. – Ani Difranco (Out of habit), In Music
Art is what you can get away with. - Andy Warhol
I am a deeply superficial person. - Andy Warhol
PAINTING, n: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. - Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary", 1906
If the work begins to look labored or inferior, drastic action is taken. I destroy the offending painting with wild swathes of paint. Most satisfying! What comes out of this spent energy is often an excellent painting. - Ann Zielinski
The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live. - Albert Pinkham Ryder
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please. - André Malraux
Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. - Ansel Adams
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. - Ansel Adams
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. - Ansel Adams
I like to think that a good painting (or a good poem or a good book, or any good thing) can be measured by how much, after experiencing it for a while, you start to forget that it was made about someone other than you. - Andrew Hershey
In feature films the directory is God; in documentary films God is the director. - Alfred Hitchcock
[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. - Al Capp (1909 - 1979)
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. - Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925)
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. - Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)
Let each man exercise the art he knows. - Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.
"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity." - Alberto Giacometti
It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience. - Berthe Morisot
The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existense - Brett Whiteley
Art is the thrilling spark that beats death - thats all - Brett Whiteley
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none. - Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. - Brenda Ueland
I'm not really foreign, you know. I just do it to appear more sophisticated! I mean, nobody'd buy Evian water if it was called Blackburn water, would they? Nobody'd wear Kicker boots if they were made in Scunthorpe! Abba? Abba, Swedish? I knew then when they were a Lancashire clog-dancing trio! Arthur, Betty, Boris and Angela! Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn--a former pipe-fitter welder from Harrogate! - Balowski, In TV Shows/The Young Ones
An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way. - Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man"
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. - Charles Horton Cooley
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. - Charlie Chaplin
I build a painting by putting little marks together--some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts. - Chuck Close
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character. - Camille Pissarro
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly
"What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things . . . it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface." - Constantin Brancusi
Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them. - Constantin Brancusi
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. - Claes Oldenburg
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry.I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks. - Donald Trump
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. - Duke Ellington (1899 - 1974)
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can. - Danny Kaye
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. - Donald Knuth, In Technology/Computers
Arthur Dent hoped and prayed there wasn't an afterlife. Then, realizing the contradiction, he merely hoped there wasn't an afterlife. - Douglas Adams, In Literature
Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art. - Dante Gabriel Rosetti
I've lost the will to paint literally. I don't see the point in worrying away with a paintbrush trying to reproduce a literal photographic texture like cloth or skin. Paint is best at being paint. Paint can never be as perfect as nature when it is trying to imitate nature. It's a lost cause. Paint can only be as beautiful as nature when it is nature, when it is it's own texture. Marks on paper have their own beauty, and it is this slipping from the literal world into the world of abstract qualities that I try to achieve in my work. If I need a shirt to look like a shirt I'll scan it into my computer. If I want a shirt to feel like the wind, or like a constricting skin, or angry, or like a consoling embrace, then maybe it should be painted or drawn... - Dave McKean
It's only words... unless they're true. - David Mamet
When you risk becoming an artist, you risk taking your talent seriously. - Dee Ito
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. - Elizabeth Drew
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake. - E. M. Forster (1879 - 1970)
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. - Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do. - Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. - Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)
What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough. - Eugene Delacroix
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.- Edgar Degas
Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. - Edgar Dega
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people - Edgar Degas
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. - Edgar Degas
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper
A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? - Ernst Haas
Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets. - Edward Ruscha
Its hard to find the light when your born in the dark - Emile Zola
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. - Emile Zola
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love. - Edvard Munch
Little kids draw pictures of the ground, the sky, and space in between. If you ask them what the in-between space is, they say 'that's where we are.' - Ed McCullough
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
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon
Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint. - Francis Bacon
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon
Kandinsky was right to appreciate Cézanne. The emergence of triangularity in the ‘Large Bathers’ was an unconscious step in the right direction, a step about to break through the crust of the future’s pictorial surface. However, agile and muscular as it may have been, Cézanne’s triangle could not shake the pyramid anchoring Raphael’s composition. The dogged perseverance of this pyramid illuminates the mystical dead weight which Kandinsky and all abstract painting following him have always had difficulty accounting for, and which in the end we, if not they, cannot live without. - Frank Stella
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live. - Frank Stella
I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle. - Frederick Franck, " The Zen of Seeing
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography. - Federico Fellini
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. - Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. - Georges Rouault
"...I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens." - Georg Baselitz
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings. - George Tooker
I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. - Georgia O'Keefe
Every great work of art is offensive to someone, for a work of art is a protest against things as they are and a proclamation of things as they ought to be. - Gerald W. Johnson
There are no rules, only tools. - Glenn Vilppu
There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "Autobiography"
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. - Georgia O'Keeffe
So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. - Georgia O'Keeffe
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. - Georges Braque
To explain away the mystery of a great painting-- if such a feat were possible-- would be irreparable harm. . . . If there is no mystery then there is no 'poetry'. - Georges Braque
They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it. - Georges Seurat
A great artist… must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. - Goethe
Art is long, life short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient. - Goethe
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
Art among a religious race produces relics; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade. - Henry Fuseli
All art is an individual's expression of a culture. Cultures differ, so art looks different. - Henry Glassie
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. - Henry James
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski (is there anything more perfect than "The Ethernal Husband"?). Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in van Gogh's letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of individual over art. - Henry Miller, "The Tropic of Cancer"
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" - Howard Ikemoto
Nature is a revelation of God; art a revelation of man. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. - Henry Steele Commager
The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette. - Henry S. Haskins
To be an artist is to believe in life. - Henry Moore
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hofmann
The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. - Heinrich Heine
It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else. - Henri Matisse
It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision -- a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage. - Henri Matisse
Precision is not reality - Henri Matisse
Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better. - Henri Matisse
Drawing is . . . not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods. - Henri Matisse
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter. - Henri Matisse
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. - Henri Matisse
. . I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so. - Henri Matisse
In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature. - Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.' - Hokusai, The Drawings of Hokosai
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