Art Quotes and Thoughts on Life... |
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| I am always reading about famous artists, writers, poets, actors, philosophers lives and have frequently been both challenged, amused, inspired and encouraged by many of their words. I have put together a few here that I hope you will find interesting. Feel free to email me with any that you would like to see added here and I will try to update this page regularly. Enjoy my own selection! One of my all time favourites, it inspired my own abstract painting: SOUND YOUR YAWP ( gallery 1) I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, :: Walt Whitman :: 'Leaves of Grass' I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. :: Woody Allen :: We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. :: Goethe :: Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.I make movies for personal therapy in the same way that a person in an institution is given baskets to weave because the therapy is good for you. :: Woody Allen :: When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. :: Rumi :: A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. :: Edgar Degas :: The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting. :: Vincent van Gogh :: It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. :: Leo Buscaglia :: I don't say everything, but I paint everything. + Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. + Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. + Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. :: Pablo Picasso :: From the beginning of my abstract work, even when it might not have seemed so, I felt there was no better model for me to choose than the Universe :: Alexander Calder :: You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint. :: Francis Bacon :: The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. + I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong. + I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do. + I have a hatred of habit and routine. And what dogs love is just that. They like regular everything, and I don't have regular anything. I have a timetable, but no routine. + My work is purely autobiographical.. It is about myself and my surroundings. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I know. + When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so. :: Lucien Freud :: I think about my work every minute of the day. :: Jeff Koons :: I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life. + In addition to the artistic influences, I am influenced by my current private life, my feelings about it and my energy level and state of health. + I never work with an audience, I can't do this. The process depends on the highest degree of nervous concentration. + I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it. :: Frank Auerbach :: Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection? + I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension. + The habit of ignoring Nature is deeply implanted in our times. This attitude reminds me of people who never look you in the ye; I find them disturbing and always have to look away. + If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste. + Changes in societal structure and in art would possess more credibility if they had their origins in the soul and spirit. If people read the words of the prophets with closer attention, they would find the keys to life. + My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life. + My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent. + But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures. + Great art picks up where nature ends. :: Marc Chagall 1887-1985 :: I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars. :: Og Mandino :: The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity.. toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea.. and the idea and the observer.. To achieve this clarity is inevitably to be understood. :: Mark Rothko :: I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. :: Vincent van Gogh :: In addition to the artistic influences, I am influenced by my current private life, my feelings about it and my energy level and state of health. :: Frank Auerbach :: Art shouldn't be something that you go quietly into an art gallery and dip your forelock and say 'I have to be very quiet, I'm in here amongst the art.' + In the times in which we live it is far too restricting to say that art can only be found in art galleries and not touch people's everyday lives.. I want to use any means that are necessary to communicate to people what I feel about things. There are no rules. :: Ken Done :: (Australian painter) :: Max Beckmann :: I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. :: Joan Miro :: The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to. ::: Frida Kahlo ::: A lady friend of mine asked me, "Well, what do you love most?" :: Andy Warhol :: A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. :: Edgar Degas :: If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished? :: Rumi Mevlana :: Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not work is salvation. :: Chuck Close :: I am risking my life for my work, and half my reason has gone. :: Vincent van Gogh :: Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. :: Rene Magritte :: Think of my pictures as dramas. The shapes in the pictures are the performers. :: Mark Rothko :: I try desperately to put everything else aside in order to concentrate.. concentrate, which is to say, "To live the painting". What a difficult state of being to move into.. it is totally another way of life than what we all are accustomed to ordinarily! :: Philip Guston :: I try desperately to put everything else aside in order to concentrate.. concentrate, which is to say, "To live the painting". What a difficult state of being to move into.. it is totally another way of life than what we all are accustomed to ordinarily! :: Philip Guston :: Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. :: Michelangelo :: My painting is visible images which conceal nothing...they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable. :: Rene Magritte :: When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us. :: Pablo Picasso :: It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past...I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old. :: Michelangelo :: Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure to be kindly spoken of. :: Jane Austen :: Painting.. we do not talk about it, we do not analyse it, we feel it. :: Bernard Buffet :: I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort. :: Jasper Johns :: Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. :: Alan Watts :: Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. + An empty canvas is a living wonder.. far lovelier than certain pictures. + There is no must in art because art is free. :: WASSILY KANDINSKY :: I’m a terrible cook, but if I could cook, I would see that as art as well, it’s how much creative energy you put into something. + If you’ve made seminal work, you never know when the next one is coming or where it’s coming from. Most artists never make a seminal piece of art in their lives, and if you’ve made two, which I have, then I’ve done all right. + I often think that I don’t really know anything, and then, when I think about my work, and my sewing, and about my blankets, I know what I’m doing: I can cut out a sentence in felt in five minutes; it would take most people that amount of time just to cut out one letter. + I know what I’m doing with my work, and that’s really a nice feeling, that I’ve created something that wasn’t there before, that’s mine. :: Tracey Emin :: I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. + I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness. + Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension. + For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings. + What I am looking for.. is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term "mute music". + My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details. :: Joan Miro :: The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. + I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself. + When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting. :: Francis Bacon :: I may seem to be passionately concerned with the 'hows' of representation, how you actually represent rather than 'what' or 'why'. But to me this is inevitable. The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see. + There comes a point where you see it all as completely empty being a popular artist to the extent that people who are not necessarily interested in art know about things or take some little interest. I think that now for me it's a burden. It's a bit hard to deal with and it wastes time as well. + When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom, it's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything. :: David Hockney :: |
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