Top 44 Surface Art Quotes
#1. It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.
Henry David Thoreau
#2. New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.
Jen Pollock Michel
#3. The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Cyril Connolly
#4. It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#5. Point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath
Oscar Wilde
#6. When I looked upon the surface of the gently flowing water, each painting that I had burned upon joining the church rose from the waves. I tried to grab them, but they dissolved upon touch.
William Poe
#7. Cease to regard the canvas as a surface on which to paint a picture, but instead as a surface on which to record an event
Harold Rosenberg
#8. Art has something to do with beauty. The act of creating beauty pulls the portion of your soul to the surface that is true to the way you were created.
Timothy Simpson
#9. Give any idea time to sink in. If it sinks let it go. If it rises to the surface, go with it.
Art Hochberg
#12. After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.
Arthur Erickson
#13. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
Chuck Close
#14. Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.
Gerhard Richter
#15. The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.
Jerry Saltz
#16. Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#17. The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art.
Pete Hamill
#18. Christian art, like obscene art, is surface level.
Anonymous
#19. Acting is not a lofty performance; it is simply the source of becoming and existing transparently. Acting, I find, is the art of frothing to the surface every raw and honest emotion. The moment an actor pretends, he loses his audience forever
Masiela Lusha
#20. She must disappear for a time from the human surface,
And sacrifice everything for this,
To recreate herself from the depths of her world.
David Foenkinos
#21. Whether it is photography, assemblage art or filmmaking, my work is to see beneath the surface.
Christophe Agou
#22. The thing is', (Rufus) Stone said, 'that if you don't believe that you are an old man, or a woman, or a tramp, then how can you expect anyone else to believe you? Looking the part is just the surface; being the part is the true disguise.
Andy Lane
#23. The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface
Lisa Renee Jones
#24. The immortality of great art seems bound up with the inevitable loss of its original surface meaning and its rebirth in the spirit of every new age.
Anton Ehrenzweig
#25. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. We all have an inner artist that has something to tell us if we allow it to come to the surface.
Bill Buchman
#27. We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Marvin Minsky
#28. The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.
Andy Goldsworthy
#29. All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.
John Banville
#30. Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.
Anita Desai
#31. My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
Andy Goldsworthy
#32. Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.
Wassily Kandinsky
#33. I've started to experiment [in the studio] with texturing the canvas, building up the surface with large brushes, palette knife or fingers. I want to say more in my art.
T. Allen Lawson
#34. Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
Stephen Sondheim
#35. What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#36. To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
Thomas Carlyle
#37. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.
Oscar Wilde
#38. I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.
Mark Rothko
#39. A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Robert Smithson
#40. It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#41. If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.
Madeleine L'Engle
#42. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.
Austin Kleon
#43. Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They're complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn't be translated into literal intent. Think poetry, not prose,
Esther Perel
#44. To be pleasing to God, art must be true as well as good. Truth has always been one important criterion for art. Art is the incarnation of the truth. It penetrates the surface of things to portray them as they really are.
Philip Graham Ryken
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