Top 100 Quotes About Making Art
#1. The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.
Agnes Martin
#2. Always good to remember when you're making art. You don't have to like it, just be ready to do the next thing.
Neil Gaiman
#3. Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes.
Steve Earle
#4. I think that's just part of how it is with making art. Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before, and everything is just ... lame.
Dana Schutz
#5. When you make work, your goal might not be first and foremost to have as many people as possible see it, but it might be more about honing your craft as a storyteller or making art, but, there's no doubt about it, you want lots of people to see it.
Jim McKay
#6. People talk about making art films - experimental films. I can make an art film every day of the week. Nothing to it. What's difficult is to combine a commercial film with art.
Carlo Ponti
#7. The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
David Rakoff
#8. During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.
Sol LeWitt
#9. I feel like I've gotten to the point where when I get tired of making art I can make a smooth transition into making music and vice versa. There is always something to do.
John Dyer Baizley
#10. Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.
Ellsworth Kelly
#11. Being a graduate student is no fun and is hard, but I'm sticking with it. I love making art.
Nell Irvin Painter
#12. I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.
Charlie Kaufman
#14. Miley Cyrus is about making money. Amanda Palmer is about making art.
Eddi Reader
#15. Making art, I try to just gently persist, instead of having freak-outs where I'm like, Oh, my god, I'll never draw again. You are going to draw again, so you might as well relax.
Gary Panter
#16. I'm making art and making decisions and editing things. I don't live my life to broadcast it into the art world; I don't see it as my life on the stage.
Frances Stark
#17. I'm making entertainment, but I'm making art. This is my art. Hopefully, it's profitable, hopefully it makes money, but at the end of the day I want it to be remembered for its artistic value as well as its entertainment value.
Morgan Spurlock
#18. You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.
Maya Lin
#19. As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it.
Damien Hirst
#20. What's interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don't know anything about it - if it's going to work or not work.
Julian Schnabel
#21. Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.
David Bayles
#22. Only 10 percent of people who go to art school will still be making art in 10 years. To some extent, you have to want to do it. It's hard. It is something you really have to stick with for it to work.
Jeffrey Brown
#23. I have a suggestion for all of those award seekers and blue ribbon hunters. Spend your efforts on making art that connects with people. Awards impress the grandkids but they don't move the gauge on selling your product. Art needs to touch the emotions of the buyer.
Jack White
#25. The act of making art is both scary and healing. Art brings light to places that have remained dark. Art brings perspective. Making art, at any level, is an act of courage and an expression of faith.
Julia Cameron
#27. Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.
Kiki Smith
#28. The Internet really does create this dimension around the music that's always in relation to what else is happening at the moment. But all you can do is ignore the annoying hum of the machine and focus on making art that makes you excited to be alive.
Alan Palomo
#29. Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.
Julia Cameron
#30. I have always been making art from an early age but for nearly forty years did computer programming to earn a living. I bought a house and put my wife and three children through college. Now that diversion is over so I can finally paint full time.
Mike Thompson
#31. I have no idea of what it's going to look like when I start a piece. Making art is like having a relationship. You want to bring in some ideas, but if you don't allow it to develop naturally and speak to you as it develops, you end up imposing and projecting upon it.
Nick Bantock
#32. I think that's my hope for a lot of the feminist movement is that the gender thing sort of stops being the selling point, if that makes any sense. We're just people making art, and that's how this process has felt to me.
Sara Bareilles
#33. There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.
David Bowie
#34. Since I started making art, I've always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself - you know?
Miranda July
#35. Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.
Rachel Kushner
#36. I find it so much easier to be creatively free at night. Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets the further into another world you go.
Mark Ryden
#37. With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art.
Janine Antoni
#38. When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
#39. I do not think making art alone makes it any better than making it with a team of people.
Olafur Eliasson
#40. The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.
Ann Patchett
#41. When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.
Kim Gordon
#42. I like that feeling when you're making art, that you're taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.
Kiki Smith
#43. Making art in America is about saving one's soul.
Charles Simic
#44. Making art for me is not fun in the sense of la, la, la, la, but it's something that I find very absorbing and very satisfying.
Nell Irvin Painter
#45. The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.
Karel Appel
#46. In my eyes, making art is very often about something that you don't know.
Lawrence Weiner
#47. I'm not intelligent enough to be a doctor, and kind of hands down you can't argue with the worth of that. But I don't really have an opinion about the worth of making art.
Rupert Friend
#49. To me, success is making a positive difference through art - making art that affects the world and that changes the way people feel about themselves and the world.
Kat Graham
#50. I visited the Museum of Modern Art and viewed the exhibition of Picasso's sculptures, and I couldn't help but think about what it would be like to have a room full of school children explore Picasso's approach to making art.
Jerry Pinkney
#51. My life is too short to focus on legislation when I could be making art. So I'm not a copyright reformer, I'm a copyright abolitionist.
Nina Paley
#52. I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.
Ann Leckie
#53. Making art is like humour - very moment dependent.
Michael Denton
#55. This might end up in crying. If you're not prepared to cry about it, I'm not sure you're making art. And if you're not prepared to dance in anticipation, you're definitely not making art.
Seth Godin
#56. If you're making art, you are not separate from your brand.
Danielle LaPorte
#57. The making of a whole person and the creation of true individuals can only happen by singing and dancing and making art.
Antony Gormley
#58. I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.
Dana Spiotta
#59. You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.
Seth Godin
#60. Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.
Philipp Meyer
#61. I think of making love and making art as being very parallel. Even the most amateur attempt can be thrilling.
Julia Cameron
#62. The idea of "making art for art's sake" makes no sense for me. Each area of my life, all the roles I play, influences the others.
Ben Sollee
#63. It's just way more fun making art, growing, grinding for a fan base, and traveling the world with a friend.
Macklemore
#64. I was a pretty pretentious kid. I was always making art.
Nate Lowman
#65. What gets me excited by the process of making art is how unrelated elements get fused, which is a formal process. The content is the easy part. Putting it together in a way that's cohesive is the challenge.
Jordan Wolfson
#66. I think having a dispassionate eye is a good way of making art. When you don't know the structures of a place, you are unencumbered.
Rory Kinnear
#67. Good art doesn't really have an expiration date on it. That's something to be happy about, if you're making art.
Devendra Banhart
#68. I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.
John Hughes
#69. The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.
Joyce Maynard
#71. Living through art is a better way to live - not necessarily making art, but being surrounded by art. I think it's just as banal as trying to show my version of the beauty in the world. It's about beauty at the end of the day.
Ragnar Kjartansson
#72. Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.
Anish Kapoor
#73. I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.
Barbara Kruger
#74. No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.
Julia Cameron
#75. Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.
Rachel Kushner
#76. It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain ... A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.
Julia Cameron
#77. I suspect you've noticed that making art can be lonely.
Jenny Holzer
#78. Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.
Damien Hirst
#79. I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.
Lou Reed
#80. I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction.
Raymond Pettibon
#81. Fear is the reason for making art. It is a means to freedom.
Ilya Kabakov
#82. ART IS MADE BY ORDINARY PEOPLE. Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. It's difficult to picture the Virgin Mary painting landscapes. Or Batman throwing pots. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art.
David Bayles
#84. I always wanted to be a stay-at-home dad making art, making movies.
Robert Rodriguez
#85. An artist can't let madness stop him from making art, he simply has to channel it.
Christopher Moore
#87. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.
Ira Sachs
#88. Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
Stephen Sondheim
#89. We talk about the vulnerability involved in sharing our work publicly. I don't think we talk enough about the real vulnerability involved in making art; if we truly engage the process we are changed by it.
John Paul Caponigro
#90. Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition; curating follows art.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#91. Making art has never been a mystery to me. It's never been something that's very difficult.
Richard Prince
#92. A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.
Bill Viola
#93. I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.
Robert Rauschenberg
#94. After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.
Robert Henri
#95. You don't make art after you become an artist. You become an artist by ceaselessly making art.
Seth Godin
#96. If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.
Henry Moore
#97. Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.
Frank Stella
#98. Making art will show you how much you already have. Your real treasures. A brand-new Maserati is a lot less beautiful to draw than a rusty old pickup.
Danny Gregory
#100. I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.
Jock Sturges
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