Artist At Work Quotes

#1. To many people Michael Jackson seems an elusive personality, but to those who work with him, he is not. This talented artist is a sensitive man, warm, funny, and full of insight. Michael's book 'Moonwalk', provides a startling glimpse of the artist at work and the artist in reflection.

Jackie Kennedy

#2. Watching something being constructed, whether you're passing a building site or whether you're watching an artist at work, is fascinating, and I think that's the enjoyment.

Nick Mason

#3. You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

Erwin McManus

#4. I keep getting compared to Marina and the Diamonds because she's kind of in the same place as me at the moment. It's quite annoying being compared, actually, because it almost downgrades your work and makes you feel like you're just another female artist.

Ellie Goulding

#5. When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.

Joaquin Sorolla

#6. This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#7. People like to think the creative process is romantic. The artist drifts to sleep at night, to be awakened by the subliminal echoes of his or her next brilliant idea. The truth, for me at least, is that creativity is primarily the result of hard work and study.

Grant Achatz

#8. I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

Helen Mirren

#9. Having a little fun at my work does not make me any less of an artist.

Clarice Cliff

#10. The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

Berthold Auerbach

#11. A true artist would see his family starve, rather than work at anything other than his art.

Anonymous

#12. All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

Antoni Tapies

#13. At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.

Mark Bradford

#14. At any point along that path, your job as an artist is to push craft to its limits - without being trapped by it. The trap is perfection: unless your work continually generates new and unresolved issues, there's no reason for your next work to be any different from the last.

David Bayles

#15. The power of beauty at work in man, as the artist has always known, is severe and exacting, and once evoked, will never leave him alone, until he brings his work and life into some semblance of harmony with its spirit.

Lawren Harris

#16. It isn't a hunch but the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind, at work. That is the mind which makes artists do things without their knowing how they came to do them. Perhaps with me it was the cumulative effect of a lot of little things individually insignificant but collectively powerful.

Jesse Lauriston Livermore

#17. The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago ...

Thomas Hoving

#18. The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.

George Saintsbury

#19. A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Susan Sontag

#20. The more you work, the less you exist. I believe (at least, I used to believe, because I no longer think this is entirely true) that the artist is like someone carrying a mirror in which everyone can look and recognize themselves, so that the person who carries the mirror ends up being nothing.

Christian Boltanski

#21. We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Dorianne Laux

#22. If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world.

Tod Papageorge

#23. I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.

Warren Ellis

#24. The artist himself is often surprised at the finished work of art. He cannot tell 'how it happened', nor could he repeat the feat at someone's bidding.

John F. Carlson

#25. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen or to watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#26. There's nothing that makes an artist more beloved than the audience pitying him because his work comes at a price they would never pay.

Rafael Yglesias

#27. What the artist must aim at above all else is this: to produce, by any process whatever, a work which by the life and humanity emanating from it communicates to the beholder ...

Medardo Rosso

#28. The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator ... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.

Octavio Paz

#29. Above all, Danny Boyle's 'Slumdog Millionaire' is the work of an artist at the peak of his powers. India is his palette, and Mumbai - that teeming 'maximum city', with 19 million strivers on the make, jostling, scheming, struggling and killing for success - is his brush.

Shashi Tharoor

#30. In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart.

Vincent Van Gogh

#31. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it ...

Walker Evans

#32. The artist doesn't really think about consequences - he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, 'Hmm, that could have worked better like this.' But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.

Twyla Tharp

#33. A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.

Jane Harrison

#34. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

Katherine Paterson

#35. I have been in the music industry ever since I was six years old. I have been inspired by so many great artists and of course trying to be original at the same time. I try not to work under boundaries while I'm making music.

Asher Monroe

#36. We are all creators. Whether or not we create is not up to us. We are human, and creating is what we do. Every interaction, movement, and decision is creativity at work. We are all artists. We all order creation around us into the world that we want to make.

Michael Gungor

#37. For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.

Yukio Mishima

#38. The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

Julia Cameron

#39. All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we're a lawyer, an artist or a police officer.

Robert Wringham

#40. At every show, people I've never seen approach me with the same story: how experiencing my work changed their lives and made them artists or writers or law enforcers or attorneys, believe it or not. It's very humbling and gratifying.

Jim Steranko

#41. Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

Chuck Close

#42. As an artist, if your work doesn't inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance ... The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators.

Alys Arden

#43. The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.

Gore Vidal

#44. My challenge as a satirical artist is how to present ideas to people to enable them to question and reexamine their beliefs. My hope is, that my work provokes people to look at things in a new way.

Joey Skaggs

#45. The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.

Patricia Hampl

#46. I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.

D.T. Suzuki

#47. At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.

Rachel Naomi Remen

#48. The artist labors while he may, But finds at best too brief the day; And, tho' his works outlast the time And nation that they make sublime, He feels and sees that Nature knows Nothing of time in what she does, But has a leisure infinite Wherein to do her work aright.

Henry Abbey

#49. As an artist, you need to be not at all entitled in your relation with the work. So money is kind of worrying. You can start to expect things if you're used to a certain level of comfort.

Eleanor Catton

#50. He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it.

E. M. Forster

#51. Practicality continues to be a challenge for me - it's at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York - not a brilliant career or I'd still be doing it - but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance.

Debra Dean

#52. If a man becomes more mature due to certain episodes in his life, it gives him the opportunity to look at life in a much more deep way. I believe the artist and the man work parallel, with the same feelings, the same soul, the same sensitivity.

Jose Carreras

#53. I hope someone thinks I sing good. I'm always working hard to sing better. I sound the way I sound, but I can always be better. I work hard at singing and being a better recording artist.

Luke Bryan

#54. The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

Henry Miller

#55. After being taught sets and reps and working at it for a length of time you can't paint by numbers anymore. It must come from within. Any artist has an emotional contact with their work. A true bodybuilder doesn't just build muscle he creates muscle. You can't be a robot.

Tom Platz

#56. It isn't illegal to buy an artist's work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!

Murray Leinster

#57. 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

#58. It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.

Andrew Wyeth

#59. It's like every time you have one of these, you're sort of - your lease is renewed another five years. And that's kind of great for me 'cause that's all I really want to be doing still at this point, like just making records and getting to work with, like, artists that I think are exciting.

Mark Ronson

#60. I've always considered myself a graphic artists - a draftsman - as opposed to a typist. I do still work on a drawing table. At times drawing on a computer feels like I'm drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch.

Michael Schwab

#61. Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.

Paula McLain

#62. The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

Max Ernst

#63. In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.

Evelyn Underhill

#64. I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.

Gustav Klimt

#65. The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

Patti Smith

#66. I really tried to work out hard to emulate the look and feel of the character, and did my best to represent the great artists that created him. At the same time, as an actor you have to find what you relate to in the character and make it your own, and hopefully people respond to it.

Daniel Cudmore

#67. I've always had the idea that multi-millionaire rock stars should work harder than anyone because they have the ability to do it. Look at an artist like Andy Warhol. He never stopped working, even after he didn't need to work again.

Buzz Osborne

#68. Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work.

Paddy Chayefsky

#69. Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar ... you never know.

Francis Bacon

#70. A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

George Bernard Shaw

#71. Aishwarya, my parent's daughter, has been brought up with enough values inculcated where I will use my discretion in my choices. At the same time, I recognize I am an actor, I am an artist, and if I feel the need to be liberated and do the kind of work I need to do, I will.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

#72. Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don't have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance.

Thomas Moore

#73. When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.

Clive James

#74. When I started getting so many haters and closed doors, I decided to prove that it could be done. I was a divorced single mother of three at the time and a size 12 - not your typical model artist that labels feel work for the music industry.

Jenni Rivera

#75. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.

Pope John Paul II

#76. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goals.

David Galenson

#77. Breughel is an example of an artist - I mean, this is true about artists and painters in general, but he is a specific example of an artist whose work contains more than you think it does at first glance. Whose work rewards, sustains attention and looking.

Teju Cole

#78. When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world.

Robert Henri

#79. I've been lucky enough to work with a make-up artist, Joel Harlow, who you can throw anything at. I said, "Joel, I need to go to the London eye with my children and I want to look like a roadie from Lynyrd Skynyrd."

Johnny Depp

#80. I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'

Hasan M. Elahi

#81. I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part.

Georges Braque

#82. I don't want to be an artist that gets stuck doing one thing. I don't want to be an artist who people look back at and say, 'His early work was really great.'

Ryan McGinley

#83. When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist's composition. The composition is the totality of the work.

Mike Svob