Landscape Art Quotes

#1. To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

W. H. Auden

#2. The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

Robert Henri

#3. The most beautiful landscape cannot hold my fascinated attention as much as nature by the seaside and all that is connected with water.

Lyonel Feininger

#4. But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.

Molly Haskell

#5. An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it.

Matthew Barney

#6. Art that arises out of the inner landscape, and is connected to our lived experience, illuminates the darkness and heals the soul.

Daria Halprin

#7. For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

#8. To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.

J. M. W. Turner

#9. My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.

Andy Goldsworthy

#10. In an ever-changing technological landscape, where today's platforms are not tomorrow's platforms, the key seems to be that any one of these spaces can use a dose of humanity and art and culture.

Ze Frank

#11. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.

Henry David Thoreau

#12. Our human landscape is overburdened with competitions and contests. Art need not be a contest. Art is a personal quest for quality. Quality is the forerunner of acceptance. Character is the forerunner of quality. Be your own discriminating connoisseur.

Robert Genn

#13. REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.

Ambrose Bierce

#14. Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception.

Jeffrey Deitch

#15. An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

Tony Hillerman

#16. Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.

Toni Morrison

#17. In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered.

Melissa Brown

#18. From Portrait of a Landscape

I think art only exists when it's being made. It's like a flower. Once picked, it starts to die.

Daniel D. Watkins

#19. Since 2000, I've been based in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it's a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#20. All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.

Ishmael Reed

#21. 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

#22. Works of art are landscapes of the mind.

Ted Godwin

#23. Sculpture is an art of the open air ... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.

Henry Moore

#24. [New Mexico is] the only landscape . . . where Nature is as aesthetic as Art; the only landscape that can compete with the great painters.

Leo Stein

#25. But it is also untrue that I have nothing specific in mind. As with my landscapes: I see countless landscapes, photograph barely 1 in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want.

Gerhard Richter

#26. I love Australia passionately. I love our landscape. It's influenced most of my work, really. Almost everything I've written is about the landscape. Trying to find, the sacred, the spiritual in it.

Peter Sculthorpe

#27. If I was whisked away ... I think I could put up with anything, except not seeing the Australian landscape. It would be a torture to have it cut off.

Arthur Boyd

#28. The beauty and wonders of nature are as alluring as the pursuit of Art, and made of me a landscape painter.

Walter J. Phillips

#29. I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.

John Pfahl

#30. What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape: it is the human figure.

Henri Matisse

#31. We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.

Doug Aitken

#32. There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances. A cloud with its motion.

Katharine Weber

#33. We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

Andy Warhol

#34. Landscape is the creation of the one God - his sensuous image and revelation, through the investigation of which, by science or its representation by art, men's hearts are lifted toward him.

James Jackson Jarves

#35. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature's nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.

Fredrik Sjoberg

#36. There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

James Frey

#37. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

#38. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

Clement Greenberg

#39. We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.

John F. Carlsons

#40. I wanted to contribute to the landscape tradition in art. By now I guess we are comfortable with the thought that man has been everywhere or affected everything in nature.

Aleksandra Mir

#41. I really do believe that art changes the landscape of the world.

Marc Jacobs

#42. I lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I'm heaven's landscape painter.

Bauvard

#43. Music, art, landscape - these are all things I draw inspiration from.

Josh McDermitt

#44. Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

Martha Graham

#45. House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces.

Edmund De Waal

#46. I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

Daniel J. Rice

#47. I don't believe too much in originality ... you learn art from other art and then looking into somebody's face or landscape is the point of departure to do your work of art.

Paterson Ewen