Artist Quotes

The glory that is given to God by the works of his creation is what we call an “external glory.” It is something outside of God. It doesn’t actually add anything to God. It is very much like an artist who has a great talent for painting and a mind full of beautiful images. If the artist puts some of those images on canvas for people to look at and admire, it still hasn’t added anything to the artist himself. It hasn’t made him any better or more wonderful than he was before (p. 5).

~ Leo J. Trese

Design is an art, creative artist must have a beautiful mind

~ Bhupesh B. Patil

The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

~ Leon Trotsky

My brain is already scrambled enough.”“Cracked,” I said, not thinking.“Yeah.” Moses scowled.“Well, it’s working for you.” I turned and looked at my walls. “Cracks and all. In fact, if your brain wasn’t cracked, none of the brilliance could spill out. Do you realize that?

~ Amy Harmon

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.

~ Constantin Brancusi

Nobody should ever receive more money for a work of art than the artist who produced it.

~ Pansy Schneider-Horst

I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.

~ Criss Jami

The artist must be blind to recognized and unrecognized form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity.

~ Wassily Kandinsky

I learned that I' have to be detached if I was ever to achieve anything at all.

~ Iain Pears

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

~ Robert Rauschenberg

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

~ Richard Diebenkorn

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

~ Ben Shahn

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

~ Amen Muffler

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

Having Simultanagnosia (object blindness), Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and Semantic Agnosia (meaning blindness) goes in my favour with regards to abstract art living in world full of fragmented pieces when I draw it is in real time no visual memory means no pre-formatted picture in my mind so I go where my hand takes it's like journey that is happening in the moment, hence why I drew these without my lenses on. When I was younger I would draw pictures by route which made it a appear that I had a visual memory (cobbling together things out of context and making a contextual image)

~ Paul Isaacs

Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'I inquire, why'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switchYeah make a way to face the music likeLife savings for a mosh pit riotListen to a mixRock the tickets, higher volumeVelocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot

~ Criss Jami

That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.

~ Syd Barrett

I'm full of dust and guitars...

~ Syd Barrett

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

Not everyone with a painting brush is an artist, likewise not everyone with a camera is a photographer

~ Ewlyn Fernando

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

Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter…I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done…But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.

~ Syd Barrett

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

I once had a drinking contest with an artist on his yacht... It amused him as I took shot after shot, and I realized that this was the reason he'd invited us, his amusement. Looking back, I thought he didn't expect we'd have anything to say, that my questions about the artist's purpose, his existential quest for self in a communally-brutalized past, were not as amusing as they were thought-provoking, but I'll never know. As I swayed like a sailor in drunken bitterness, I felt something had been sacrificed to his art. He'd gone so far out on that boat there was no way for him to come back. I felt he no longer existed and was just the faded intention of color on canvas. His humanity had surely been washed away with the paint thinner.

~ Megan Rich

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

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

~ Gertrude Stein

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

Women, the most beautiful things in the world,” answers the model. As if it’s the only thing worth painting, as if everyone should aspire to it. Normally coming from a guy that answer would sound so incredibly skeezy—a greasy, obvious pick-up line. But something about this guy’s earnest tone tells me he means it. -from Model Position by Kitsy Clare

~ Kitsy Clare

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

Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.

~ Robert Henri

Cubism is a Cathedral of shit.

~ Francis Picabia

Don't be an artist. Be somebody's artist.

~ Zev Rector

In my experience, what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.

~ Terry Pratchett

As an artist suffering from insomnia and working from my apartment, I had an artistic freedom to explore and create awesome stuff. I wore a robe and slippers as my work dress code. These are the days when creativity is my best imaginary friend. And I was crazy enough to create what people would call masterpieces.

~ Shawn Lukas