Art Quotes

If an artist is not only he who sings or paints, but he whow express himself by words or illustrations then I can consider myself as one.

~ Amen Muffler

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand.

~ Dani Shapiro

The artist is the only one qualified to criticize his art, because only the artist knows what he was trying to express and how satisfied he is with the attempt.

~ Ron Brackin

Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.

~ Criss Jami

In the act of creation, as in all the arts, the soul should be felt in the face and the fingers and the tongue, even in the cavities.

~ Chris Campanioni

And still, still, there is more to describe- we paint because drawing breath is an agony and exhaling an ecstasy and somewhere in the space in-between we think we once found a truth; and the eternal part of us desires to share this truth at all costsonly it's never quite how we pictured it, and it's never quite received the way we wantand the paint drips with our own blood the handles of our brushes are our own bonesour own tears become the words to our most beautiful love songs and we know we'll never get it right before we die-getting up every morning and facing our own limited truth is a courage so divine most men quell and women stay enslaved in silence.

~ Marie Anzalone

Anything can be art: painting stairs, raising a child, or organising a trip to the end of the world. It's the way you live that makes you either an artist, or an art connoisseur, or an unsatisfied critic.

~ Mykyta Isagulov

..it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, completes what nature left unfinished.

~ Sophia Loren

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

~ Chaim Potok

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.

~ Chaim Potok

I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are.

~ Laird Barron

Choosing to be an artist . . . is choosing to mine deep caverns. It's like getting lost in the darkness and spending the rest of your life trying to find your way.

~ Michele Zackheim

Fine art is the discipline of breaking rules.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

Art is a journey of excellence not a goal of perfection.

~ Jacqueline Patricks

In many times, after creating a piece of work I want to stand up and applaud.

~ Shawn Lukas

I had spent many years living with a plain piece of canvas just right on my face as a headboard for my bed. As the years passed by, I watched it slowly transforming into a work of art which still lives above my head. And that my friend, is truly living art.

~ Shawn Lukas

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.

~ James Joyce

Every piece of art is a mirror and serves the function of reflectivity to expose to you and reveal to you more of who you are.

~ Darryl Anka

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.

~ Robert Henri

There is something deeply satisfying in shaping something with your hands. Proper artificing is like a song made solid. It is an act of creation.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don't understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world develops, free from my control, yet intrinsically dependent upon me. I am sweating with elation. I have no idea what I am doing, or what it is my hands are trying to see. There is so much strength in this clarity I am overpowered by the independence of it.

~ Daniel J. Rice

I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human consciousness.

~ J.d. Salinger

Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.

~ Amélie Nothomb

As a kid I never knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to create things. And then I wanted to be an astronaut. I would paint stars and the atmosphere and then frame and hang the universe up on my bedroom wall. A few years down the line while I was still stargazing, I came to realize that I’m halfway around the world chasing something and the whole time it’s in my backyard. From the very beginning I was who I always wanted to be.

~ Shawn Lukas

A paint brush is the only tool I use extensively in my works, to push paint on canvas and conduct melodies. And that's exactly what Garden Avenue is, and all of my projects after that.

~ Shawn Lukas

For me, a paint brush is the only tool I use extensively in my works, to push paint on canvas and conduct melodies. And that's exactly what Garden Avenue is, and all of my projects after that.

~ Shawn Lukas

Now relax, think positively and begin --- the smile of success awaits you.

~ Claudia Nice

Protect the ears of your heart, rather than being drawn in each day like the fading tides that dance daily with the moon.

~ Eric Samuel Timm

Artist is not human, but humanity.

~ Raheel Farooq

Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.

~ Elfriede Jelinek

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work the mirror with a memory as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth (Minor White, Newhall, 281).

~ Minor White

The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen.

~ Elfriede Jelinek

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

~ Andres Serrano

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

~ Claude Monet

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about? -Pablo Picasso.

~ Pablo Picasso

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

~ David Foster Wallace

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.

~ Henri Matisse

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]

~ Irving Stone

The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.

~ Steven Pressfield