Top 100 Artist Work Quotes
#1. Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.
Terry Teachout
#2. You can be an artist, work hard for your work and also share while trying to create community with other artists.
Sarah Kay
#3. The technology can help the artist work in a different way and the artist also helps define what the technology should be. They call for the tools that they want to be able to tell their story. I thought that was really exciting and interesting.
Christopher Kenneally
#4. No artist work is so high, so noble, so grand, so enduring, so important for all time, as the making of character is a child.
Charlotte Saunders Cushman
#5. The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.
Thomas Aquinas
#6. My work as an artist is completely separate from my work as a philanthropist.
Lady Gaga
#7. I had no idea the amount of people who even knew who I was. Suddenly, they were coming up and saying, "You're my favorite artist." Very surreal. After years of trying to get work, and then coming here and being able to meet some of the fans of Array.
Eric Wight
#8. 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
#9. Five percent seems very little to ask when you consider that the artist, through his or her efforts over many years, is largely responsible for the increased value of their work.
Joe Fafard
#10. A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.
Grandma Moses
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.
Steven Pressfield
#15. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#16. To be an artist means to invite an occupation into your life that requires commitment and hard work, but the rewards and satisfaction you'll get make the work seem like play. But you have to do it every day.
Veronica Lawlor
#17. In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.
Viktor E. Frankl
#18. If an artist wants to work with me because they feel I've made some credible albums and there've been things that are long-lasting, it's because those artists took the time and we built an idea.
Phil Ramone
#19. In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.
Evelyn Underhill
#20. But I found that being an artist and doing accurate work is very difficult.
Alan Bean
#22. The teacher, like the artist and the philosopher, can perform his work adequately only if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
Bertrand Russell
#23. The thrill of creation which we experience which we experience when we see a masterpiece is not unlike the feeling of the artist who created it; such a work is a fragment of the world which he has annexed and which belongs to him alone.
Andre Malraux
#24. The reason you work as an artist is to stay open and ask questions.
Robert Wilson
#25. The artist, who must venture into the studio and risk there, and then venture into the marketplace and risk again, is obliged to learn how her defences work, so that she can drop and raise her guard instantly.
Eric Maisel
#26. Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.
Amit Kalantri
#27. I've achieved what every artist wants, which is that some of their work will outlive them.
George Michael
#28. I always feel like it is a privilege to be able to be an artist and to be able to exhibit my work all over the world.
Jim Drain
#29. Talking with other artists is an incredible process. You engage with the work very differently ... a nd different relationships between different works start to emerge. To tap into that energy-to tap into that moment-is great for me as an exercise.
Shahzia Sikander
#30. The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.
Max Ernst
#31. 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
#32. In many times, after creating a piece of work I want to stand up and applaud.
Shawn Lukas
#33. Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.
Howard Schultz
#34. 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
#35. The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.
Aasif Mandvi
#36. 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
#37. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#38. I've been doing this for seven and a half years. I've been just bustin' it, trying to break in as an artist in this business. For me, it's still just about the work. I get the scripts and I'm all about that. I don't really even have an idea what that's going to be like.
Josh Holloway
#39. 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
#40. Until you learn that an artist cannot afford to scorn any phase of life that is human, you will never do great work.
Marjorie Benton Cooke
#41. 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
#43. The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.
Sylvia Plachy
#44. 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
#45. I definitely want to work with people who are artists and who are interested in being their best version of themselves.
Andre Holland
#46. 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
#47. Tis not your work, but Love's. Love, unperceived, A more ideal Artist he than all, Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes Darker than the darkest pansies, and that hair More black than ashbuds in the front of March.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. I just didn't wanna put the pressure on myself to be in there [Def Jam South] to work as an artist and to have the hat as the executive with other projects.
DJ Khaled
#52. If you wanna be an artist carry sketch pad with you, and sketch everything you see. Get so you can draw anything and it looks like what it's supposed to be. It's a lot of work, but if you really have it in you, it's not like work. It becomes fun.
Stan Lee
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. You are both a work of art and an artist at work.
Erwin McManus
#56. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.
Jennifer McMahon
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. As a producer, you're pretty much creating a body of work that an artist has to stand behind.
DJ Jazzy Jeff
#60. 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
#61. I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.
Wayne Thiebaud
#62. A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man ...
Henri Matisse
#63. Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.
Allan Sekula
#64. Anything you ever make that matters takes a long time. Some artists never see their work in front of an audience, so for them 15 years is a blink of an eye. I am nothing but grateful.
Adriana Trigiani
#65. As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it.
Julia Cameron
#66. I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I've spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.
David Shrigley
#67. The out-of-work actor wears out more than shoe leather. The very sensibilities that make him an artist are shattered by the disregard he is shown as a human being.
Bette Davis
#68. There's so much great stuff out there. The artists who've been most formative to me are the ones I've had the privilege to work with over the years.
Nick Blaemire
#69. The artist likes to seem totally responsible for his work. Often he begins to explain it, to make it appear as if it were a reasonable process.
Arthur Erickson
#70. 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
#71. To see distinctly the machinery
the wheels and pinions
of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.
Edgar Allan Poe
#72. The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?'
Ariel Gore
#73. Nearly a half-century on from feminism, simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act. And getting one's work shown continues to be met by enormous inbuilt resistance.
Jerry Saltz
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.
Alexander Calder
#77. What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?
Laura Dern
#78. I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
Bill Viola
#79. Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
Willa Cather
#80. The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
#81. 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
#82. It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.
David Sedaris
#83. The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.
Edward Ruscha
#85. The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
John Cage
#86. The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.
Nell Zink
#87. I was so fortunate to sing and work with so many amazing performers and artists.
Rayvon Owen
#88. That your own interpretation of a work of art is flagrantly subjective seems to be regarded as an arrogant attitude. But the truer view is that the interpretative artist can only make his own comment upon the work.
Tyrone Guthrie
#89. Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.
Talib Kweli
#90. We are image-makers and image-ridden ... We work until we vanish.
Philip Guston
#91. Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.
Madeleine L'Engle
#92. 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
#93. Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we're working all the time.
David Hockney
#94. 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
#95. The trick is to paint a picture that doesn't exist, and yet that fits perfectly into an artist's body of work.
Wolfgang Beltracchi
#96. A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity, be it that of the artist, or of the artisan. In any kind of creative work the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the world outside
Erich Fromm
#97. An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.
Michelangelo
#98. I'm in between an installation artist, video artist and photographer. And when you work with nude bodies, you're immediately called a pornographer or a fashion photographer.
Spencer Tunick
#99. 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
#100. In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive.
David Bayles
