Top 85 Artist Vision Quotes
#1. And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.
Maya Deren
#2. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper
#3. I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.
Serj Tankian
#4. All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that the vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection.
John Connolly
#6. 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
#7. We are part of each other and part of something bigger than our own egos. An artist should ... bring into the world some vision. Dancers should ask, "What is their work in the service of?"
Bill T. Jones
#8. I get hired as a writer or producer and I do the best I can to bring out that artist. If somebody calls you to do something, you go right for that vision and you're aware of that person's vibe. You're trying to get inside of them.
Lenny Kravitz
#9. Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
George Santayana
#10. Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.
Kahlil Gibran
#11. 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
#12. Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.
Amelie Nothomb
#13. You think, 'You hired me because I'm a creative artist with a vision. Don't try and knock it out of me.'
Sam Taylor-Johnson
#14. I think, you know, for me, whatever I need to slot into to make that music the best it can be or help the artists, or whoever I'm working with, achieve whatever vision they have in their head for a song.
Mark Ronson
#15. Practically all great artists accept the influence of others. But ... the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personnel.
Romare Bearden
#16. You must speak the vision of your project in a way that convinces people to pay for it. If they won't pay for it, that is the artist's fault. It is my fault. It is your fault. It is not the executive's fault or the world's.
Jill Soloway
#17. Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.
Don DeLillo
#18. The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision.
James Lee Burke
#19. The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.
John F. Kennedy
#20. The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.
George Henry Lewes
#21. The artist must raise the cup of his vision aloft to the gods in the high hope that they will pour into it the sweet mellow wine of inspiration.
Paul Brunton
#22. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
John F. Kennedy
#23. The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.
Henri Matisse
#24. In Paris, I met a young American person who immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that had directed my forces. Throughout my career as an artist, I refer to this person by the word 'Woman.'
Gaston Lachaise
#25. I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.
Susan Griffin
#26. Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.
Georges Seurat
#27. The artist is the only lover; he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.
Isadora Duncan
#28. The real function of the artist is to give fresh vision to their own generation.
Doris McCarthy
#29. True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world.
Oskar Kokoschka
#30. For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.
David Bayles
#31. An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James Whistler
#32. A good artist does not just make imaginations beautiful to the mind, but also more pleasant to the eye with a superb visible touch of excellence.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#33. It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
C.A. Dawson Scott
#34. To be an artist is to take responsibility for the world's destiny. You shape it by your vision.
Laurence Gartel
#35. Sometimes an artist's vision may get blurred when subjected to a committee because an artwork is usually an expression of something unconscious that is better left in the realm of one person's unconscious if it is to speak to another person's unconscious.
Philippa Perry
#36. Express your vision,
define your goals,
proceed with precision
till the end is known.
Inspiration is your map,
passion is your driver,
imagination is the vehicle
and art is the destination.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#37. Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision.
Peter Ustinov
#38. We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it ... because you cannot compromise an artist's vision.
Ed Wood
#39. Only the brave should teach ... Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.
Pearl S. Buck
#40. The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
Guy De Maupassant
#41. What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper's painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper's vision we see more.
Robert Adams
#42. An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.
Maya Lin
#43. As an artist, my concern is toward the synthesizing of all the visual elements at my disposal - at the exclusion of none.
Ken Danby
#44. An artist strives to frame his ideals in an image; to challenge his audience and to make his vision immortal. But the parasites say 'no, your art must serve the cause ... your ideals endanger the people!'
Andrew Ryan
#45. I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.
Rita Ora
#46. It's tough as an artist to have such a specific vision for your video in mind when you write a song. Reaching out to directors is like going on blind dates and trying to find someone who sees the exact vision behind your music, which can be really difficult.
Hayley Kiyoko
#47. Sometimes artists are control freaks and it's certainly important to have a vision, but within that vision you need to allow freedom and personality- or you light as well hire robots.
Oh Land
#48. Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.
Ernst Haas
#49. A dreamer rises above their inherent fearfulness that they will always produce inferior work and grants oneself a license to put forth their best effort.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#50. A young artist's career is a matter of claiming a place for oneself, of saying, "I am here." Having gone through that phase, a more mature artist can concentrate on truly developing talent and vision.
Wafaa Bilal
#51. Measurements are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
David McCullough
#52. Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
Jerry Saltz
#53. He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.
Jack Finney
#54. The artist's personality, built upon strong desires and compassionate vision, is by its nature prone to depression.
Eric Maisel
#55. I believe that every artist has his or her own vision of the world; our job as artists is to find and express that vision. The most important thing is to keep exploring, yourself and your materials.
Carole Katchen
#56. Staying true to my vision, to the word as it comes to me, to my own aesthetic judgments, even when they disagree with the majority culture, is very important to me, and I think important for every artist. It's what we have: our voice, our intuition, the truth as we understand and know it.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
#57. Artists paint not for their own enjoyment but to share their vision with others.
John Kurtz
#58. The artist, viewing his fellows through his personal vision, has through the ages attempted to portray what he sees and to present his understanding of it. Censorship in his case has perpetrated heavy and sometimes reprehensible blunders.
Hollis Alpert
#59. The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.
Paul Strand
#60. Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.
Madeleine L'Engle
#61. A poet is simply an artist whose medium is human emotions. A poet chisels away at our own sensibilities, shaping our vision while molding our hearts. A poet wraps words around our own feelings and presents them as fresh gifts to humanity.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#62. I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.
Jim Woodring
#63. People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.
Cheryl Strayed
#64. We're in a post-conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are prized rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work. Today, our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman.
Jeffrey Deitch
#65. A great artist has a unique vision ... obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.
Jerry Saltz
#66. 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
#67. We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.
Madeleine L'Engle
#68. A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.
Shannon L. Alder
#69. You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?
Jason Robert Brown
#70. I think when you work with really wonderful directors who have a really strong vision, it lets you as an artist set the tone for your own career.
Sarah Gadon
#71. It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'
Steven Pressfield
#72. There is a special aura about artists who take their visions to the highest pinnacles of success ... I get very excited about the magnitude of the aura I see, when Alan performs.
Bill Aucoin
#73. Sometimes you have to be a diva. All the artists I admire from Madonna to Whitney to Mariah have all been called divas. If you are strong, if you have vision, if you are an artist, you have to do what you believe in. And if you get called a diva for it, then so what.
Jessie J.
#74. The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.
August Wilson
#75. Some people worked well with daily discipline, but she'd always been more of a need-a-deadline or consumed-by-vision artist.
Melissa Marr
#76. The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.
Marya Mannes
#77. Success is different for every artist - I get psyched when i help realise their vision etc.
Matt Squire
#79. [I'm] a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.
Usher
#80. [My] goal as an artist is to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision.
Roger Ballen
#81. It is vital for artists to nurture and protect that which will make their vision unique.
Jane Fulton Alt
#82. 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
#83. If you're using a computer as an artist and expressing your personal vision, I think your personal vision comes through.
Dave Gibbons
#84. I'm aware of being a stranger, an outsider, and that's always an advantage for an artist. It means I can see from the inside and the outside. I have that double vision.
John Hirsch
#85. Artists never make wars. They are too busy making life out of the matter of their visions.
Marya Mannes
