Quotes About Artist And Art

#1. Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.

Kiki Smith

#2. At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, completes what nature left unfinished.

Sophia Loren

#3. 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

#4. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#5. 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

#6. Why should not the camera artist break away from the worn out conventions and claim the freedom of expression which any art must have to be alive.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

#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. 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

#9. 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

#10. Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

George Edward Woodberry

#11. 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

#12. I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.

Chuck Berry

#13. I have to perfect my beard every morning and it takes a long time. I think a lot of musicians are into graphic design and art. I decided to be a little bit of an artist on my face.

Craig David

#14. The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.

Jeff Koons

#15. An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

Anton Chekhov

#16. Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#17. 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

#18. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

Oscar Wilde

#19. Being an artist and a musician, I have witnessed the previous generation taking the art form, not as a way of making a living, but as a belief, an almost maniacal, sometimes insane devotion and commitment to communication.

David Finckel

#20. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

Tom Bissell

#21. Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.

Don Miguel Ruiz

#22. I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.

Hermann Hesse

#23. 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

#24. To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'

Langston Hughes

#25. To be bound by traditional martial art style or styles is the way of the mindless, enslaved martial artist. But to be inspired by the traditional martial art and to achieve further heights is the way of genius.

Bruce Lee

#26. Don't listen to what anyone tells you about the kind of music you make. Just make it! Be yourself, make your own music, and be totally true to your art. Because it's kind of a selfish thing to be an artist.

Billy Sherwood

#27. Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.

Donald Knuth

#28. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.

Neil Gaiman

#29. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

Evan Hunter

#30. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

Seth Godin

#31. In many times, after creating a piece of work I want to stand up and applaud.

Shawn Lukas

#32. At school, I always felt the art room was the place where you could sit and talk. It was a place of solace. I wasn't the best artist at school by a long shot; it was more the understanding and the support that came from that room.

Sam Taylor-Wood

#33. I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.

Jerry Pinkney

#34. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Auguste Rodin

#35. God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though
and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

David Foster Wallace

#36. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Sol LeWitt

#37. Ask yourself, are you an artist, or are you an art business? You can be both, but to be successful you need to think and act like a business owner.

Dave Conrey

#38. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.

Truman Capote

#39. In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ...

Madeleine L'Engle

#40. All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Albert Schweitzer

#41. I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

#42. 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. There are too many artists, too many dealers and too much art.

Walter Darby Bannard

#44. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.

Jonathan Culver

#45. 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

#46. In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Marc Chagall

#47. People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

Keith Haring

#48. An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

Carl Andre

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

Frank Stella

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

Erwin McManus

#55. Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".

Joan Lindsay

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Music is art, and once you become an artist, you need to learn how to accept criticism.

Yanni

#59. I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Barry McGee

#60. For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#61. 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

#62. I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me.

Nikki Rowe

#63. But as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.

Olga Grushin

#64. She gave life a meaning.
She was art, dressed like a painters pallet, bright and unaware of how goddam beautiful she could be turned into; with the right touch, her smile was the brush and her story was the canvas.

Nikki Rowe

#65. The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait,
A revenge not only necessary but right and clever
Simply to leave him out of the scene forever.

Donald Justice

#66. Life is the greatest art of all, and the master artist is the man who is living the beautiful life.

John Edgar Park

#67. I am an artist. The track is my canvas, and the car is my brush.

Graham Hill

#68. When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.

Leela Corman

#72. He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

Francis Of Assisi

#73. The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

Madeleine L'Engle

#74. 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

#75. Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

D.H. Lawrence

#76. The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Oscar Wilde

#77. Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger ... and more concentrated.

Henri Matisse

#78. It's her ability as an artist to see possibility where others see a blank page and, by extension, to see victory where others see certain defeat that truly empowers her ...

Sarah Cross

#79. ...Michelangelo transformed both the practice of art and our conception of the artist's role in society.

Miles J. Unger

#80. Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.
The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.

Seth Godin

#81. An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.

Thelma Golden

#82. My sister is an artist and an interior designer. She went to high school for art. I went to high school for music.

Maira Kalman

#83. Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us ... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]

Liesbeth Heenk

#84. 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

#85. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

J.D. Salinger

#86. She pours sugar on her life
and drinks the artist's marrow
in the bone of her glass and she lives.

Kelli Russell Agodon

#87. If I, as a human being and artist represent anything in the world, it is my Jewish people, and therefore Israel is the only state on our planet which I want to represent with my art and all my public activities, no matter where I live.

Evgeny Kissin

#88. I'm an artist; I do not destroy, but create scars. And above that, I am an inventor of new ways to create them.

Hillary Wen, Hildy Wen

#89. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Keith Carter

#90. At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.

Catherine Hicks

#91. It's an old and sad story. The artist lets the bottle or the dope get between him and his art. He spends half his life achieving success and the second half throwing it all away. How many talents have self-destructed before him? How many more will follow in his wake?

H. Joaquin Jackson

#92. A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.

Jeffrey Lewis

#93. The creative mind can turn chaos into a master piece and call it Art.

Nikki Rowe

#94. It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.

Raymond Pettibon

#95. That kind of pursuit is not beneficial to mankind: art for self aggrandizement at the cost of love.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#96. Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Rebecca West

#97. The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

Seth Godin

#98. A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.

Amit Kalantri

#99. Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.

Paul Banks

#100. The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.

Kuo Pao Kun