Top 100 Artist Art Quotes
#1. The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.
Wale
#2. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites.
Camille Paglia
#3. I was so absolutely riveted, I felt I was looking into the eyes of the artist. Art just closed the gap of time and space. The 16th century became as real to me as the 20th. It was something magical.
Betty Churcher
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.
Jeff Koons
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
Michelangelo
#15. The artist is always dancing with death.
Marty Rubin
#16. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#17. She (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.
Steven Pressfield
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
#21. 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
#22. There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#23. The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.
Tori Amos
#24. I am an artist. The track is my canvas, and the car is my brush.
Graham Hill
#25. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?
Camille Pissarro
#26. All artists are mothers. To be an artist is to be a creator, whether of a symphony or a supper or a painting or a person. Motherhood is the primary art, the art of creating (procreating) people.
Peter Kreeft
#27. The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#28. An artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
#29. The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill.
Amit Kalantri
#31. In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well.
Jean Toomer
#32. An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.
Steve Martin
#33. Sex is an art; those who know better are the better artists.
M.F. Moonzajer
#34. The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.
John Chamberlain
#35. If an artist does not have an erotic involvement with everything that he sees, he may as well give up. To be a human being may a very messy thing, but to be an artist is something else entirely, because art is religion, art is sex, art is society. Art is everything.
Lucas Samaras
#36. I would rather fail as an artist than succeed as anything else.
Robert Dowling
#37. 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
#38. You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.
David Cronenberg
#39. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Henry David Thoreau
#40. It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#41. For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation's advancement. I wanted to go a step further and extend the boundaries.
Audrey Flack
#42. One thing is certain, anyone who collects art is not an artist.
Heinrich Boll
#43. When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams
#44. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung
#45. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Oscar Wilde
#46. When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
Umberto Eco
#47. These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.
Jerry Saltz
#48. I'm just following my own art, and I just think that the only thing I can do to be a great artist is do the best job I can in whatever movie I do.
Justin Chon
#50. My definition of art is whatever an artist calls art. Us speaking could be an artwork, us sitting in the near-dark in your kitchen beside the dirty dishes and smoking, me thinking of what to say next.
Matthew Brannon
#51. The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.
Henry David Thoreau
#52. How many are silenced, because in order to get to their art they would have to scream?
Anne Clark
#53. The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.
Leo Tolstoy
#54. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#56. No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't ... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.
LeRoy Neiman
#57. When you steal from an artist you are stealing their blood, sweat and tears.
Tyler Shields
#58. Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.
Chuck Jones
#59. Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Aldous Huxley
#60. We're able to influence younger generations on design and art. They might not have realized they were an artist.
Douglas Wilson
#61. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.
Gordon S. Haight
#62. Unlike other reformers, Luther rarely claimed divine inspiration for his ideas. It is interesting too that he uses the word Kunst - art - for it suggests that the insight, like the skill of a craftsman or artist, opened up a whole new ability to accomplish things in a different way.
Lyndal Roper
#63. The sculptor, the painter the musician the dancer, or any artist, if he can first obtain celebrate in Paris, acquires very easily the esteem and eulogy of other countries.
Swami Vivekananda
#64. General belief is "There is no real magic, only tricks" but a great magician compel people not to trust that belief and make them believe, after all "There does exist a real magic".
Amit Kalantri
#65. The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies
Kate Chopin
#66. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
Gerhard Richter
#67. Overall, I think any opportunity to expose people to art on a mass level - to have some kid in Oklahoma say to his mother, 'I want to be an artist' - is a good thing.
Jeffrey Deitch
#68. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Pablo Picasso
#69. Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#70. If an artist wants to be original, he should not look to art for inspiration, for art seeks its model in life, not art - and only life is rich enough to simulate originality.
Anthony Marais
#73. Some art are meant to cut short
stretching them unnecessary makes it dull.
Yarro Rai
#74. The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Eugene Delacroix
#75. Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#76. Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.
Henry Ford
#77. Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop's another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you're talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It's like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.
Bo Burnham
#78. Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.
Gerhard Richter
#79. Art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies.
Arthur Wesley Dow
#80. A high self-esteem having artist works hard to be understood. A low self-esteem having artist works hard to be agreed with.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#81. The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian
The Artist's Way A Spiritual Path to Greater Creativity by Julia Cameron
Piet Mondrian
#82. As an artist you have to keep reinventing yourself.
David Hammons
#83. I remember growing up, saying you're an artist it sounds pretentious but now it's one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.
Marilyn Manson
#84. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.
Oscar Wilde
#85. The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#86. In all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist."
Kenny Smith
#87. Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.
Paul Cezanne
#88. When you fall in love with a work of art, you'd die to meet the artist. I am a student of the galleries of Pacific sunsets, full moon rises on the ocean, the clouds from an airplane, autumn forests in Raleigh, first fallen snows.
And I'm dying to meet the artist.
Yasmin Mogahed
#89. The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.
Paul Cezanne
#90. As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego Rivera
#92. 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
#94. Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.
Hans Hofmann
#95. I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art,
James Agee
#96. I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me
and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.
D.H. Lawrence
#97. There's a point at which when I start to know a man well
this isn't true of women
I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.
Kathy Acker
#98. I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist ... ..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.
Jean Dubuffet
#99. It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's
Samuel R. Delany
#100. Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.
Carl Andre
