“One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”

— Irving Stone , book The Agony and the Ecstasy

Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Irving Stone 21

American writer 1903–1989

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“A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist.”

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“Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.”

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“[An artist must apply] his personal faculties to the ideas and the events of the times in which he lives... [A]rt in painting should consist only of the representation of things which that are visible and tangible to the artist. Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artist who have lived in it. I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can exist only of the representation of both real and existing things... An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not within the domain of painting.”

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

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“One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”

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