Visual Artist Quotes

#1. I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.

Bonnie McKee

#2. The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary.

Aberjhani

#3. Well, as a visual artist working with the phenomenon of cinema, the grammar of cinema, [making a feature] was bound to happen. Everything I do is like sculpting with image and sound.

Nicolas Provost

#4. Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician - but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment's hesitation.

Oliver Sacks

#5. I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.

P.J. Harvey

#6. I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

#7. I would have been a visual artist. When I was in high school, that was one of the things ... I had to make a decision what I was going to go to college for, and at the time, I also painted and sculpted. I got more attention for my performing, so I thought that was a better idea.

Josh Young

#8. I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.

Erykah Badu

#9. I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

Peter Landesman

#10. I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do.

Carrie Brownstein

#11. I began as a boy with artistic talent ... as a visual artist ... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

Russell Banks

#12. Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.

Bjork

#13. The much-lauded visual artist Roni Horn got her Master's in Sculpture from Yale in the Seventies, but in the course of her career she has moved, among other media, from watercolors to photographs to floor-sized installations and mats of poured gold.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#14. Doing representations of real people is not my strongpoint as a visual artist, and I know that.

Nate Powell

#15. I was at a time of my life of making choices, I suppose: am I a writer, am I a visual artist? And when I was a teenager. I thought I would be a film-maker. Am I a musician? If so, what kind of musician am I?

David Toop

#16. Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

Wayne McGregor

#17. Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.

Andy Serkis

#18. At the age of 80, I'm becoming a visual artist. This could be my rebirth.

Harry Seidler

#19. Beyonce is such a visual artist. This was just trying to figure out another side to her that could be fun and young and exciteful and a great video.

Bryce Wilson

#20. To me, as a visual artist, I don't want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#21. I wanted to be a visual artist because I grew up around a lot of painters and photographers and had a very artistic upbringing. And I fantasized about being a drug-dealer when I was a kid. I thought it would be a good opportunity; I knew that the market would be strong. Is that bizarre?

Jared Leto

#22. Musically, it's difficult to believe Jim has only two hands and one set of vocal cords. You would think that there were a dozen of him if you closed your eyes and listened. From a visual artist's standpoint, Jim is a man of a thousand faces, all spellbinding.

Jeff Mathews

#23. Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

Edward R. Tufte

#24. The process of drawing is ... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture ... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication.

Michael Ayrton

#25. It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are.

David Hockney

#26. My bottom line is that I think Ridley Scott is one of the greatest visual artists of our time and I feel very privileged that he wants to work with me, so I go with that flow.

Russell Crowe

#27. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.

Ryan Kavanaugh

#28. Video is a funny thing. It's one thing to be an artist, singer-songwriter, and use words and create pictures in people's minds. And then be asked to do video for it, to actually give a certain visual for your song.

Melissa Etheridge

#29. My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

Jeff VanderMeer

#30. I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.

Dani Shapiro

#31. I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.

Neill Blomkamp

#32. As an artist, my concern is toward the synthesizing of all the visual elements at my disposal - at the exclusion of none.

Ken Danby

#33. What also excites me is that the artist attempts with the visual what I attempt to do with words: stop time, create a moment, and celebrate the process.

Nancy Moser

#34. I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

Siri Hustvedt

#35. Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

Jerry Saltz

#36. Color, like everything else concerning visual expression, usually boils down to a gift, an innate sensibility and sensitivity. Ultimately, artists develop their own palette and color sense.

Scott Kahn

#37. Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.

Daniel H. Pink

#38. Me being able to be acting and doing other things has opened me as an artist, and I think even more from a visual standpoint.

Common

#39. I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.

Molly Crabapple

#40. What to paint was a problem for the war artist ... the old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone forever ... the impressionistic technique I had developed was now ineffective, for visual impressions were not enough.

A. Y. Jackson

#41. In the visual arts, for example, the semiological approach to graphics provides a rigorous analysis of the visual means used by the artist. It defines the basic properties and laws governing the arts and suggests objective criteria for art criticism.

Jacques Bertin

#42. My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.

Jeff VanderMeer

#43. Artists are part of the information process ... Visual history is important in providing a record of what is going on - levels of intention, levels of confidence, levels of aggression or control.

Leon Golub

#44. Every artist who evolves a style does so from illusive elements that inhabit his or her visual storehouse.

Mary Carroll Nelson

#45. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.

Joseph Campbell

#46. Artists who have produced experimental innovations have been motivated by aesthetic criteria: they have aimed at presenting visual perceptions. Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental.

David Galenson

#47. As both a fine artist and a graphic designer, I specialize in the visual presentation of words.

John Langdon

#48. For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation's advancement. I wanted to go a step further and extend the boundaries.

Audrey Flack

#49. A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.

John Updike

#50. Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let's face it, frivolous - especially the visual arts, with their connotation of "the starving artist" and the mistaken concept of necessary talent

Betty Edwards

#51. A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image.

Roy H. Williams

#52. The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.

Michel Hazanavicius