Top 100 Art Picture Quotes
#1. Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.
Charles Saatchi
#2. Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.
John Le Carre
#3. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and ... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
Henri Matisse
#4. Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce
#5. Cease to regard the canvas as a surface on which to paint a picture, but instead as a surface on which to record an event
Harold Rosenberg
#7. Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.
Banksy
#8. Sometimes I'll drive around for months despair, nothing, nothing, then suddenly I will see something that seizes me ... a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows and I send up a prayer because I know I have the germ of a picture.
Jeffrey Smart
#9. When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.
Marc Chagall
#10. A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture.
Anonymous
#11. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.
Mark Twain
#12. It's God - I recognised him from Blake's picture.
Robert Frost
#13. Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.
Pablo Picasso
#14. A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.
Tomie DePaola
#15. I think they're bogus, honestly. How utter garbage like Crash and Million Dollar Baby can win best picture, where true works of art such as Garden State go untouched is beyond me. It just proves how close-minded America really is, and I refuse to take part in it.
Zach Braff
#16. The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!
Barbara Kruger
#18. There is no greater picture than that of 10,000 smiling children. No brighter music than their clear-ringing laughter. That I, with my small amusements, have created such precious art is my life's proudest achievement.
P.T. Barnum
#19. Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart.
LL Cool J
#20. A story is told that Whistler once painted a tiny picture of a spray of roses. The artistry involved in the picture was magnificent. Never before, it seemed, had the art of man been able to execute quite so deftly a reproduction of the art of nature.
Sterling W. Sill
#21. Every picture's painted differently, every one has got a vision in their mind. That fills the heart with answers, and the missing piece that we hope to find.
Terri Clark
#22. The painted picture was a bit rough, which was probably done on purpose, yet seemed eerily real as if there actually was a way to step through it into the wild jungle
Akutra-Ramses Atenosis Cea
#23. Music, art, writing ... it's like some
magical psychic drainage. A way of
tapping into the bigger picture of all
it is to be human.
Lou Rhodes
#24. I cared nothing; my point of view in that instance, as in all others like it, was, that if the paper chose to send an outsider and an ignoramus to criticise works of art - especially the works of a new and tentative and experimental school - then, on the head of the paper let the just doom fall.
Arthur Machen
#25. I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.
Gerhard Richter
#26. The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.
Banksy
#27. To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn't think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.
Aaron Siskind
#28. Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.
Auguste Renoir
#29. A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows
Mati Klarwein
#30. Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.
Raymond Chandler
#31. I spent a long time in art school so I can really draw. I'll doodle and suddenly I'll find the beginning of the movie in one picture. Usually, I start my stuff on the telephone. Right by the telephone I've got a book of doodles. When I'm on the phone, I'll be doing a drawing eventually.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#32. A foolish picture I live in disgust, degradation being eaten by lust.
Ozzy Osbourne
#33. The art was just a way of hooking people in, saying: "Hey, maybe there's something cool about the tenant meeting. If the picture's really cool and weird, maybe I should check this out." And I think all of my art has really developed out of that realization.
Eric Drooker
#34. All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone
my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music
ensemble music, not soloism
we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
#35. What is this world? What is it for? It is art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the Infinite.
N.D. Wilson
#36. All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.
Henri Matisse
#37. We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks the contemplation of a work of art.
John F. Carlson
#38. The picture is not a documentary, ... It's a drama that has to be crafted. Reality is not art. You have to make choices when you're trying to make something work. And the choices we make I think are accurate. There aren't any lies in it. There are assumpt
Mark Rydell
#39. Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.
Nancy Horan
#40. The average tax payer is not a big voluntary supporter of the arts. The only art that the average taxpayer buys voluntarily either has a picture of Bart Simpson on it or little suction cups on its feet so you can stick it onto a car window.
Dave Barry
#42. The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#43. I love you beyond paint, beyond melodies, beyond words. And I hope you will always feel that, even when I'm not around to tell you so.
Kiera Cass
#44. Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture
Jeanette Winterson
#45. Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed, dignity never been photographed.
Bob Dylan
#46. Everyone is so preoccupied by youth. People talk about how the movie business is a microcosm of the bigger picture, or life imitating art, but the business is guilty for getting women out of the way.
Sam Elliott
#47. We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.
John F. Carlsons
#48. Art tries, literally, to picture the things which philosophy tries to put into carefully thought-out words.
Hans Rookmaaker
#49. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.
G.K. Chesterton
#50. The picture must all come out of the artist's inside. It is the image that lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.
D.H. Lawrence
#51. What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. Great art is not a matter of presenting one side or another, but presenting a picture so full of the contradictions, tragedies, [and] insights of the period that the impact is at once disturbing and satisfying.
Pauli Murray
#53. You took a pretty picture and you smashed it into bits, sank me into blackness and you sealed it with a kiss.
Madonna Ciccone
#54. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
Oscar Wilde
#55. [Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... )
Vito Acconci
#56. One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#57. The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.
Edwin Land
#59. Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
John Burnside
#60. If a painter, then, paints a picture of an ideally beautiful man, complete to the last detail, is he any the worse painter because he cannot show that such a man could really exist?
Plato
#61. What if you began to see your art as something other than your idea? What if it was less lofty and more necessary to your daily rhythm? What if your art is part of a bigger picture, part of a daily grace God has in mind for someone else?
Emily P. Freeman
#62. ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It's difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art.
David Bayles
#63. Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.
Otto Dix
#64. The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form ... I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.
Georges Braque
#65. The picture is a self-sufficient work of art. It is not connected to anything outside.
Kurt Schwitters
#66. To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
Edward Weston
#67. Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.
Peter Wright
#68. I see football as an art and all players are artists.
If you are a top artist, the last thing you would do is paint a picture somebody else has already painted.
Cristiano Ronaldo
#69. I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do ...
Marcel Duchamp
#70. As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.
Robert Stromberg
#71. Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime.
George Barr
#72. A picture is a work of art, not because it is 'modern,' nor because it is 'ancient,' but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling.
John F. Carlson
#73. Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.
John Ford
#74. To me art means power to sway people not with my words but with a mere picture. Art means expression, not my own but of the subjects. Art means truth; because when you see a picture you see all that is real. Art is exposure, showing things in a way they haven't been seen before.
CV
#75. Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.
Peter Hammill
#76. I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.
Elizabeth Peyton
#77. As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.
Jake Owen
#78. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.
Whitney Otto
#79. There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it.
Robert Adams
#80. A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
Mark Rothko
#81. Wrestling needs to be about the art form again. It needs to be about painting a picture and having a really good match.
Hulk Hogan
#82. Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.
Lawren Harris
#83. Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.
Gerhard Richter
#84. Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.
George Oppen
#85. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art's sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.
Upton Sinclair
#86. Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.
Henri Matisse
#87. Here are vast numbers of portraits of Jesus in the art galleries of this world. These images are often so conflicting that they offer little help in achieving an accurate picture of what Christ looked like during the period
R.C. Sproul
#88. I started collecting art ... simply because I wanted pictures to hang on the wall. I noticed what a difference a picture could make to the ambience of a room, and indeed how shifting work around could change a room's whole feeling.
Michael Audain
#89. I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.
Conrad Hall
#90. Let us not satisfy ourselves with a knowledge of God in the mass; a glance upon a picture never directs you to the discerning the worth and art of it.
Stephen Charnock
#91. The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.
Hans Hofmann
#93. A picture is a fleeting moment of life preserved on a canvas.
Debasish Mridha
#94. Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?
Banksy
#95. My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
Emma Thompson
#96. Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#97. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
Ivan Klima
#98. So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise.
Garson Kanin
#99. Westerns are closer to art than anything else in the motion picture business.
John Wayne
#100. If we try to think back to the dim and distant past ... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art ... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.
Maria Montessori
