Top 100 Art Artist Quotes
#1. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#2. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri Baraka
#4. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.
Jonathan Culver
#5. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#6. Art is maybe a subversive activity. There is a certain rebellion when you are an artist at heart, even if only in the art of living.
Philippe Petit
#8. Confidence and courage are special skills to the art ... Within the four walls of his study, the artist should be modest, work diligently and conscientiously. While for the public, he'll show himself audacious, yes even into cheerful boldness. And so a new public's darling has arisen.
Robert Schumann
#9. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#10. I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.
Henry Ossawa Tanner
#11. All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
Albert Schweitzer
#13. In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ...
Madeleine L'Engle
#14. The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
Paul Strand
#15. Ask yourself, are you an artist, or are you an art business? You can be both, but to be successful you need to think and act like a business owner.
Dave Conrey
#16. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Sol LeWitt
#17. 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
#18. Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent." p.179
"He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep." p.213
Henning Mankell
#20. It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.
George Bernard Shaw
#21. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.
Auguste Rodin
#22. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell
#23. I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.
Jerry Pinkney
#24. At school, I always felt the art room was the place where you could sit and talk. It was a place of solace. I wasn't the best artist at school by a long shot; it was more the understanding and the support that came from that room.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#25. In many times, after creating a piece of work I want to stand up and applaud.
Shawn Lukas
#26. Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.
Vik Muniz
#27. Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".
Joan Lindsay
#28. Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?
Mahatma Gandhi
#29. The artist had captured a moment that went on suggesting other moments in the mind of the beholder. This, Timmon told me, was what every painter, every singer, every craftsman sought to create.
Jim Grimsley
#30. The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
Al Alvarez
#31. You are both a work of art and an artist at work.
Erwin McManus
#32. You are an artist," she said. "But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.
Pearl S. Buck
#33. No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.
Frank Stella
#34. It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
H.L. Mencken
#36. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
#37. A photographer is a photographer and an artist is an artist. I don't believe in labels or titles. Why should a painter or sculptor who has probably never challenged the rules be an artist just because his title and an art school education automatically make him one.
Peter Lindbergh
#38. He printed business cards celebrating his shift. They read, 'Ars gratia pecuniae.' Translated, it meant, 'Art for money's sake.
Kliph Nesteroff
#39. The artist is always dancing with death.
Marty Rubin
#40. It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
Ezra Pound
#41. The artist ... is the voice of the people.
Alice Walker
#42. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
Marshall McLuhan
#43. The finest productions of human art are immensely short of the meanest work of Nature. The nicest artist cannot make a feather or the leaf of a tree.
Thomas Reid
#44. An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.
Carl Andre
#45. True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein
#46. I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Claude Monet
#47. People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.
Keith Haring
#48. She (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.
Steven Pressfield
#49. But it's your Oracle," I protested. "Can't you tell us what the prophecy means?"
Apollo sighed. "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.
Rick Riordan
#50. In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
Marc Chagall
#51. If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.
Madeleine L'Engle
#52. We all have an inner artist that has something to tell us if we allow it to come to the surface.
Bill Buchman
#53. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
Oscar Wilde
#54. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.
Anselm Kiefer
#55. Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#56. A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection
Michelangelo
#57. Make your life your art. It doesn't have to be that you're an artist. I know I talk about art a lot, but I mean a very broad thing with that. You could be a veterinarian, that's your art. Find your art; find your thing you love.
Gerard Way
#58. An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.
Anton Chekhov
#59. The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.
Jeff Koons
#60. I have to perfect my beard every morning and it takes a long time. I think a lot of musicians are into graphic design and art. I decided to be a little bit of an artist on my face.
Craig David
#61. The special calling of the artist is to call the world to a kind of rest or remind it of its restlessness
William A. Dyrness
#62. I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.
Chuck Berry
#64. I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.
Jeff Koons
#65. Each person may see a fight in different ways ... They can see more to a primal way. Others they can see in a pure artistic way ... For me I see the pure artistic way, the way that a true martial artist can show his art.
Roger Gracie
#66. Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
George Edward Woodberry
#67. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.
Rollo May
#68. The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.
Edward Ruscha
#69. A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.
Hans Hofmann
#70. A degree in art doesn't automatically make you an artist any more than lacking a degree precludes you from becoming an artist.
Ted Orland
#71. What I strive most to achieve in art is to make you forget the material. The sculptor must ... communicate whatever struck his sensibility, so that a person beholding his work may experience in its entirety the emotion felt by the artist while he observed nature.
Medardo Rosso
#72. Why should not the camera artist break away from the worn out conventions and claim the freedom of expression which any art must have to be alive.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#73. As art reveals the artist more than the world, so you see yourself and what you are not in the mirror of another culture.
Jennifer Stone
#74. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#76. An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#78. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#79. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#80. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#81. Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
Donald Knuth
#82. The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
Michelangelo
#83. Don't listen to what anyone tells you about the kind of music you make. Just make it! Be yourself, make your own music, and be totally true to your art. Because it's kind of a selfish thing to be an artist.
Billy Sherwood
#84. To be bound by traditional martial art style or styles is the way of the mindless, enslaved martial artist. But to be inspired by the traditional martial art and to achieve further heights is the way of genius.
Bruce Lee
#85. To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'
Langston Hughes
#86. The artist's duty is to defend the exceptional: the imagination.
Marty Rubin
#87. Most true artists care about music as a pure, passionate art form, but can get caught in the trap of the business. Which, sadly, has now become more important than the artist or even the music itself.
Rosanna Arquette
#88. 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
#89. Mrs. Nixon and I share the sorrow of millions of Americans at the death of Louis Armstrong. One of the architects of an American art form, a free and individual spirit, and an artist of worldwide fame, his great talents and magnificent spirit added richness and pleasure to all our lives.
Richard M. Nixon
#90. It's very true that an artist who networks well will have better opportunities than one who doesn't network well. But great networking skills without great art won't change art history.
Mark Kostabi
#91. Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.
Amit Kalantri
#92. I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.
Hermann Hesse
#93. Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.
Don Miguel Ruiz
#94. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell
#96. Being an artist and a musician, I have witnessed the previous generation taking the art form, not as a way of making a living, but as a belief, an almost maniacal, sometimes insane devotion and commitment to communication.
David Finckel
#97. A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#98. My job is art curator, not artist. All I have ever wanted to do is immerse myself in art, to enjoy it, to learn about it, to write about it, to talk to others about it.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#99. My child has to be an artist,
because conceiving her will be the best art
my body has ever accommodated.
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
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