Quotes about artist
page 6

“Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility. The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 4: Ingres I: The Years of Inspiration

Art, Drawing

“When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it inspire me, does it touch and move me, do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset? That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories. Most of them are bullshit anyway. Most critics and theorists have little respect for artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. Real art is intense, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Art is not logic, and if you want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Interview by Brendan Maher http://www.gottfried-helnwein-interview.com/index.html, Start, Ireland, November 24, 2004

Education, Art, Soul, History

“For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

On her four years stay in Japan from March 1916, quoted in Japan (1916- 1920) http://www.searchforlight.org/TheMother_lifeSketchpart5.htm

“concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech
Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art; and artists happen to be human beings.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)

World, Art, Freedom, Fight

“In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form... Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Gustave Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!... These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.... but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 156-157, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Love, Truth, Feeling, Imagination

“Both artists and neurotics speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 21

Men, Communication

“If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849), P. 108

Art

“If I were the type of artist that didn't care whether or not my works communicated with viewers then I wouldn't bother exhibiting them, I might as well stock them in a warehouse. But I do exhibit and I do care because I want to communicate back to the viewer what I've viewed. My paintings are inspired by my homeland's traditional spaces. My colors are the colors of monasteries and mosques, the color of ruins of Sassanid and Seljuq era, colors of Bazaars of Isfahan and Shiraz, and colors of northern-Iran's ceramics. I have sensed all these colors, forms and everything within my painting's frame from the viewer's own world.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Negin (1971), p. 57

World, Color, Communication, Sense

“Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

Art, Sense, Dependency

“The immobility that the artist creates is not at all that of the photograph. A worth of art contains latent life, possibility of movement; a grimace made eternal does not represent life. One always talks of w:Donatello, but never of della Quercia. Yet della Qercia invented w:Michelangelo’s style before Michelangelo.”

Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) sculptor from France

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 408

Life, Art

“Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.”

Lucy R. Lippard (1937) American art curator

Quote in: Ken Johnsonoct. " Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding Conceptualism http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/arts/design/lucy-r-lippard-and-conceptual-art-at-brooklyn-museum.html." in New York Times, Oct. 18, 2012.

Friendship, World, Art, Way

“Poincaré was an artist par excellence. Estheticism with him was not a mere creed: it was a way of life.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 1. The Iconoclast

Life, Way

“Interviewer: Would you say any other manga artists have influenced you?”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

“The one thing to say about art and life is that art is art and life is life, that art is not life and life is not art. A 'slice-of-life' art is no better or worse than a 'slice-of-art' life. Fine art is not a 'means of making a living' or a 'way of living a life', and a artist who dedicates his life to his art or his art to his life burdens his art with his life and his life with his art. Art that is a matter of life and death is neither fine nor free.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Source: 1956 - 1967, Art-as-Art Dogma' part II, (1964), p. 155

Life, Death, Art, Way

“I admired and felt the anonymous structure of the work of Brancusi, Vantongerloo, Arp, and Taeuber-Arp [the wife of Hans Arp] whose studios I visited. [Kelly frequently visited Hans Arp and his wife in Paris and discussed his fresh-made art with them intensively]. Their work reinforced my own ideas for the creation of a Pré-Renaissance, European type art: its anonymous stone work, the object quality of the artifacts, the fact that the work was more important than the artist’s personality. Of the Europeans, I mostly admired the way Picasso, Klee and Brancusi 'made' their art. Contrary to what has been said about me, Mondrian and Matisse did not interest me when I was in Paris. Mondrian’s [paintings] could not be seen in Paris and when I did see them in Holland in 1953, I thought their structure too rigid and intellectual.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. unknown : 'Notes from 1969'

Art, Way, Idea, Painting

“But when a great artist or a great writer lays hold upon either sort of ugliness he transfigures it instantaneously. With a touch from the magic ring he metamorphoses it into beauty. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy.
When Velasquez, paints Sebastian, King Philip's dwarf, he gives him such an appealing look that we read the poor creature's secret and see the tragedy it involved — a man forced to get his living by discarding his human dignity, and becoming a toy, a living joke. The more poignant his martyrdom, within that misshapen body, the more beautiful the artist's work.
When Millet paints a poor rustic leaning upon a hoe, a wretch broken by fatigue, scorched by the sun, degraded as a beast of the field, he has only to add an expression of resignation in order to make this hideous nightmare a magnificent symbol of humanity.
When Shakespeare gives us Tago or Richard III, and when Racine gives us Néron and Narcisse, moral ugliness, interpreted by minds so clear, so penetrating, becomes a marvelous theme of beauty.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Secret, Beauty, Reading, Sun

“I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 166

Art, Appearance

“My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of wilfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud, and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 12 (Introductory text to the portfolio Transfusion,1990.)

Pleasure, Art, History, Thinking

“It is impossible to explain the latest works of these wild men | that is, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, and Die Brücke, [working in Munich, and Berlin] in terms of a formal evolution and a reinterpretation of Impressionism. The loveliest prismatic colors and the famous Cubist style have become meaningless in terms of the objectives of the iconoclasts. Their thinking has a different aim: with their labor, they want to create symbols for their era. symbols that belong on the altars of the coming spiritual religions behind which the technical producer will vanish.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote of Franz Marc, in his text in the Almanac of the 'Blaue Reiter', 1912; as cited in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 95
1911 - 1914

Men, Religion, Color, Thinking

“Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“There was a little white statue there. Now I'm not artistic. I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on - I always wonder why it's Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples - and this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn't look as if he was enjoying himself, and small wonder.”

Diana Wynne Jones book The Homeward Bounders

Source: The Homeward Bounders (1981), p. 13.

Art, Clothes

“It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 2: Theories of the Postmodern

“Let us not attempt, from the pontifical throne of realism-at-any-cost, to condemn all the art forms which have evolved since the first half of the nineteenth century for we would then fall into the Proudhonian mistake of returning to the past, of putting a straitjacket on the artistic expression of the man who is being born and is in the process of making himself.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Art, Past

“I’ve always chosen the most competitive and most difficult careers — that’s kind of all I know. Being a dancer is the same thing. You’re auditioning. You’re working really hard to achieve that goal as an artist. With modeling, you’re auditioning. You’re putting yourself out there. So acting was just another venue, but the most difficult one to actually achieve and to actually work because it’s much more cutthroat. But I was used to it because I had already been auditioning through dance and modeling so I knew that aspect of it.”

Crystal Allen (1972) American actress

Interview: Crystal Allen on Lacrosse, Superman and Storms http://www.celebrityextraonline.com/2012/05/interview-crystal-allen-on-lacrosse.html (May 18, 2012)

Dance

“well boss
mehitabel the cat
has reappeared in her old
haunts with a
flock of kittens

archy she said to me
yesterday
the life of a female
artist is continually
hampered what in hell
have i done to deserve
all these kittens
i look back on my life
and it seems to me to be
just one damned kitten
after another
i am a dancer archy
and my only prayer
is to be allowed
to give my best to my art
but just as i feel
that i am succeeding
in my life work
along comes another batch
of these damned kittens
it is not archy
that i am shy on mother love
god knows i care for
the sweet little things
curse them
but am i never to be allowed
to live my own life
i have purposely avoided
matrimony in the interests
of the higher life
but i might just
as well have been a domestic
slave for all the freedom
i have gained
i hope none of them
gets run over by
an automobile
my heart would bleed
if anything happened
to them and i found it out
but it isn t fair archy
it isn t fair
these damned tom cats have all
the fun and freedom
if i was like some of these
green eyed feline vamps i know
i would simply walk out on the
bunch of them and
let them shift for themselves
but i am not that kind
archy i am full of mother love
my kindness has always
been my curse
a tender heart is the cross i bear
self sacrifice always and forever
is my motto damn them
i will make a home
for the sweet innocent
little things
unless of course providence
in his wisdom should remove
them they are living
just now in an abandoned
garbage can just behind
a made over stable in greenwich
village and if it rained
into the can before i could
get back and rescue them
i am afraid the little
dears might drown
it makes me shudder just
to think of it
of course if i were a family cat
they would probably
be drowned anyhow
sometimes i think
the kinder thing would be
for me to carry the
sweet little things
over to the river
and drop them in myself
but a mother s love archy
is so unreasonable
something always prevents me
these terrible
conflicts are always
presenting themselves
to the artist
the eternal struggle
between art and life archy
is something fierce
yes something fierce
my what a dramatic
life i have lived
one moment up the next
moment down again
but always gay archy always gay
and always the lady too
in spite of hell
well boss it will
be interesting to note
just how mehitabel
works out her present problem
a dark mystery still broods
over the manner
in which the former
family of three kittens
disappeared
one day she was talking to me
of the kittens
and the next day when i asked
her about them
she said innocently
what kittens
interrogation point
and that was all
i could ever get out
of her on the subject
we had a heavy rain
right after she spoke to me
but probably that garbage can
leaks so the kittens
have not yet
been drowned”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

mehitabel and her kittens http://donmarquis.com/reading-room/kittens/ archy and mehitabel (1927)

Love, Life, Wisdom, God

“Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant little to the wealthy. The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing — running servants replaced running water. Television and radio — the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets — all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of western capitalism have rebounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 5 “Created Equal”, p. 147

Life, Home, Water, Personality

“I do not know if there are in fact such things as definable social standards of aesthetics that would have any historical or artistic value, but whether there are or not it seems clear to me that for the painter nothing less than complete personal involvement of a moral nature will do.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Italian Report (1955)

Nature, Personality

“An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Inarticulate Touches
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Dogs, Dependency

“My paintings are always images of my whole psychic makeup. You cannot deny yourself. You ask, am I painting myself? I'd been a swindler if I did otherwise. I'd be denying my existence as an artist. I've been also asked, what do you want to convey? And I say, nothing but my own nature... I am nothing but an optimist.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

1960s
Source: Hofmann, in Ashton, (1960's) Twetieth Century Artists on Art, 218

Nature, Painting

“art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother. While the fruit of the plant grows independent forms and never resembles a balloon or a president in a cutaway suit the artistic fruit of man shows for the most part a ridiculous resemblance to the appearance of other things. Reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things. thus man thinks he is able to live and to create against the laws of nature and he creates abortions. through reason man became a tragic and ugly figure. i dare say he would create even his children in the form of vases with umbilical cords if he could do so. reason has cut man off from nature.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Arp wrote this in lowercase letters
Notes From a Dada Diary; published, 1932 in 'Transition magazine'; as quoted (in lowercase letters), “Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 17
1930s

Children, Law, Art, Nature

“For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle. And it was… nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is "thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief". And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.”

Rickard Falkvinge (1972) former head of the Swedish Pirate Party

P2P Consortium Interview http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=15274 (January 12, 2008)

Money, Nature, Knowledge, Change

“You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 1820)
Letters (1817–1820)

“We have to give our opinion, we have to say something, or we are a part of it. As an artist I am forced to say something.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Ai Weiwei, Nursing Head Wound, Sharpens Criticism, 2009

Parting

“I don't understand how many painters can be so short-sighted to value art from earlier periods as completely worthless. Every art is an expression of an era and only for that reason already it is interesting. A Rembrandt has gone other ways, but he has certainly also pursued the highest goals. That one can assert: it is not necessary for a painter to have an impression when he is painting an Image, is nonsense. Certainly an artist, if he is really an artist, always has an inner urge to create an Image and thus sees an impression for himself that he may not always be able to explain, because deeper feelings are very difficult to grasp in words, but he has an impression - otherwise he only makes paintings as pure brain work. And intellectual art I can't bear. You can not make abstract art as something on its own. One feel various forms in their inner coherence. For example: when reading a fairy tale I can get the idea to paint a forest in completely abstract forms with motifs of trees. Every abstract form has an inner meaning for me.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: Ik begrijp niet hoe veel schilders zo kortzichtig kunnen zijn kunst uit vroegere perioden als volkomen waardeloos aan te merken. Elke kunst is een uiting van een tijdperk en alleen daarom al interessant. Een Rembrandt is andere wegen gegaan maar heeft zeker ook de hoogste doelen nagestreefd. Dat men beweren kan: een schilder hoeft bij het schilderen van een Bild geen voorstelling te hebben, is onzin. Zeker heeft een kunstenaar, als hij werkelijk artiest is, altijd een innerlijke drang een Bild te scheppen en ziet dus een Bild voor zich dat hij misschien niet altijd verklaren kan omdat diepere gevoelens heel moeilijk in woorden te vatten zijn, maar een voorstelling heeft hij - anders maakt hij schilderijen en is het puur hersenwerk. En intellectuele kunst staat mij zeer tegen. Abstracte kunst is niet op zich zelf staand te maken. Men voelt verscheidene vormen in hun innerlijke samenhang. Bijvoorbeeld: bij het lezen van een sprookje kan ik de ingeving krijgen een bos in geheel abstracte vormen met boommotieven te schilderen. Elke abstracte vorm heeft voor mij een innerlijke betekenis.
Quote of Jacoba van Heemskerck in her letter of 1 May 1920, to Gustave Bock in Giessen, Germany; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5) Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 168
1920's

Art, Way, Feeling, Idea

“For the artist, fulfillment of self consists not in marching in the ranks of the liberators but in being entered in the roll of the Masters. The artist tends to find himself in the position of a deserter from his social group — or, at best, one who collaborates, with secret reservations.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 271, "Being Outside"

Secret

“True artists, turned critics, think also less of rules than of values.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Thinking

“The artist make things move, and is moved. He is policeman, motor car, everything at once. He who makes things move also creates rest. That which aesthetically is brought to rest is art.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In 'The Grand Boulevards' (of Paris), Piet Mondriaan, in 'De Groene Amsterdammer', 27 March 1920 pp. 4-5
1920's

Art, Cars

“The violent quarrel between the abstractionists [like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, both English sculptors] and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part. And I think the first inception of a painting or a sculpture may begin from either end.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), pp. 254-255

Art, Imagination, Thinking, Parting

“The first impression and a natural one is, that the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as patronage has been given to them or withdrawn, but it will be found that there has often been more money lavished on them in their worst periods than in their best, and that the highest honours have frequently been bestowed on artists whose names are scarcely now known.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Lecture, Literary and Scientific Institution, Hampstead, (25 July 1836), from notes taken by C.R. Leslie
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Money, Art, Nature

“Not only the artist but everyone "becomes someone else" in becoming someone. One is thought about, thus invented. Or as Steinberg put it with memorable succinctness in his Cogito drawings, "I think, therefore Descartes is." One creates not oneself but another. Being is in the act.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 196, "Saul Steinberg"

Thinking, Drawing

“We worked together for seven years. Tenniel and other artists declared I would not work with Carroll for seven weeks! I accepted the challenge, but I, for that purpose, adopted quite a new method. No artist is more matter-of-fact or businesslike than myself: to Carroll I was not Hy. F., but someone else, as he was someone else. I was wilful and erratic, bordering on insanity. We therefore got on splendidly.”

Harry Furniss (1854–1925) Irish artist and illustrator

On Lewis Carroll; pp.104-5.
"Confessions of a Caricaturist", vol. 1 (1901)

“And my aim in my life is to make picture and drawings, as many and as well as I can, then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking: "Oh, pictures I might have made!" Theo, I declare I prefer to think how arms, legs, head are attached to the trunk, rather than whether I myself am or am not more or less an artist.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Autumn 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 338) p. 21 1880s, 1883

Love, Life, Hope, Thinking

“Writers, artists, and commentators on websites are detained or thrown into jail when they reflect on democracy, opening up, reform and reason. This is the reality of China.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Higgins, Charlotte. " Ai Weiwei: ‘China in many ways is just like the middle ages http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/ai-weiwei-china-last-interview." Guardian.co.uk., April 11, 2011. 2010-, 2011

Democracy, Reality

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

People, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Money, People, Truth, Age

“Fox Business bigwigs are said to be perturbed by a very special guest on the fledgling biz channel the other night - Pricasso, the world's greatest penile artist. That's right, he paints portraits with his private parts.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Oh, Baby, Was X-Tina Ragin', New York Daily News, 24 February 2008, Jo Piazza, 18, Daily News L.P.]
About

World, Business, Parting, Painting

“[another part / version of Whistler's lecture:]
Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano. That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

1870 - 1903, his lecture 'Ten O'Clock' (1885)
Source: James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Weinberg, H. Barbara, 'Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History'. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/whis/hd_whis.htm (April 2010)

Truth, Beauty, Music, Nature

“.. I am not going to New York, I am leaving Paris. That's quite different. Long before the war [World War 1. ] I already had a distaste for the 'artistic life' I was involved in. – It's quite the opposite of what I'm looking for. – And so I tried, through the Library, to escape from artists somewhat. Then, with the war, my incompatibility with this milieu grew. I wanted to go away at all costs. Where to? My only option was New York where I knew you [ Walter Pach, artist and friend of Duchamp] and where I hope to be able to escape leading the artistic life, if needs be through a job which will keep me very busy. I ask you to keep all this from my brothers [all his brothers were artists as well] because I know my leaving will be very painful for them.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

the same goes for my father and sisters.
Quote in Duchamp's letter to Walter Pach, Paris 27 April 1915; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 157
1915 - 1925

Life, Pain, War, World

“The test of every act of creativity: Does it help you to enthusiastically, passionately, whole-heartedly and gratefully Embrace all your life? This, I believe, is the basic purpose of all the arts—and thus should be the basic Intention of every artist.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: A Few Words on Art (Just a Few) (2010), p. 2

Life, Art, Passion, Help

“In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Swiss sculptor and painter (1901-1966)

Alberto Giacometti (1945), as cited in: Joel Shatzky, ‎Michael Taub (1999), Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets. p. 302

Art

“The internet is not necessarily a golden goose yet, but we must fight to keep it safe, keep it level, keep it democratic, keep it open, keep it diverse so that when it becomes the golden goose, we independent artists can share and maybe at least get a wing or a thigh, even if we don’t get the breast meat.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

CraveOnline http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/507781-exclusive-cannes-interview-lloyd-kaufman-on-nuke-em-high May 28, 2013 2013

Fight

“Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that's universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it… enrichment, that's the function of music.”

Bill Evans (1929–1980) American jazz pianist

http://www.billevanswebpages.com/billquotes.html.

People, Art, Music, Soul

“The magic happens only when the artist serves with love and the listener receives with the same spirit.”

Ravi Shankar (1920–2012) Indian musician and sitar player

Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, 27 November 2013, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

Love

“I want to work. It is an obsession. I am gnawed at the heart by an excruciating desire to manipulate color... I see figures, with an incredible intensity, pass before my eyes. Let us analyze this – if it is possible to toss it. Why do you no longer work? Why work again? Faith has left me – the habit of putting myself into the background, has done the rest. Am I a true artist? Yes, yes, yes. Am I a woman? Alas. Yes, yes, yes. Are the two [very probably Jawlensky & Marinanne] able to work as a pair? No, no, no. Who will take up the desires -?... The work of my life, this talent [Jawlensky] that I protect with all my interest, with all my affection, it must be alone in the dwelling. Reason says, calm yourself. But the great passion in me, and my call to work, destroys all the calm acquisitions of my life.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Life, Faith, Color, Passion

“Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn't care where it is … the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

Art, Perfection

“Plastic automatism.... as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Modern Painter's World, Robert Motherwell , Dyn, Nov. 1942, p. 13
1940s

Question

“If you push it, it feels good; I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with kinesthesia. I feel now that I am painting I'm not drawing anything, or even representing non-objective art. You know, you can represent abstract art, too, as well as heads figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters, you know that. And a lot of figurative artists are very abstract. I don't feel as if I'm doing that. I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. I always thought I am a very spiritual man, not interested in paint, and now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are, a balloon, how light things are, things levitating, pushing forms, make me feel as if my hand is pushing in a head, bulges out here and pushes there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Art, Feeling, Light, Drawing

“I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist's palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 28, p. 326-327
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Way, Feeling, Imagination, Optimism

“The artist's feeling is his law. Genuine feeling can never be contrary to nature; it is always in harmony with her. But another person's feelings should never be imposed on us as law. Spiritual affinity leads to similarity in work, but such affinity is something entirely different from mimicry. Whatever people may say of Y's paintings and how they often resemble Z's, yet they proceed from Y and are his sole property.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote from Friedrich's writings Thoughts on Art, Caspar David Friedrich; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 32 Variant translation: The artist's feeling is his law. Pure sensibility can never be Unnatural; it is always in harmony with nature. But the feelings of another must never be imposed on us as our law. Spiritual relationship produces artistic resemblance, but this relationship is very different from imitation. Whatever one may say about X.'s paintings, and however much they may resemble Y.'s, they originated in him and are his own. (** In: 'Caspar David Friedrich's Medieval Burials', Karl Whittington - http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring12/whittington-on-caspar-david-friedrichs-medieval-burials) undated

People, Law, Feeling, Nature

“The role of the artist.... and the poet is precisely to blur normal categories, to disrupt them, and by doing so restore to the eyes and the mind ingenuity and freshness.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Dubuffet once explained to Jacques Berne; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, p. 256 undated

“RockNet: Were you terribly uncomfortable at the recent Grammy Award Show?
Cornell: I don't know. It's just a strange subject. It's almost as if the music industry is patting itself on the back in a way. This was the seventh Grammy nomination for us and had we won one for our first nomination I would have had a really cool attitude about it because it would have meant that the people who were actually voting were paying attention to music for music's sake as opposed to some other reason.
I was happy that we were nominated because it was an independent record company and it was a low-profile record. We didn't win a Grammy until we'd sold several millions and it seems that what sells a lot is what wins, even though the record may or may not be any good, but that seems to be the requirement.
I'm not critical of the people who work in the music industry, and I appreciate the Grammy. (But) to me it's their party and it's not really mine. It's not for the musicians. It has more to do with the industry. You can tell after a Grammy period all the record labels and artists who won a bunch take out full-page ads in the trades gloating. That's fine. That's what they do, they sell records and they work really hard to develop careers. If they're into it, I'm not going to be disrespectful, but I'd hate for anyone to think that it's something that was a necessity for me or the rest of the band, or that it was a benchmark to us of legitimacy for us because it's not. It doesn't really matter that much to us. It seems like it's for someone else. I'd never get up and say that. If I was totally not into it, the best thing to do is to not show up.
Maybe ten years from now I'll reflect and say "wow, that happened and it was pretty unusual. Not every kid on the block gets to go up and pick up a Grammy Award."”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

It's just one more thing to take the focus away from what we like to do, which is to write music and make records and try not to think about anything whether it's how many records we sell or what people think of us. For us, I think the key to success for being a band and always making good records is always going to be forgetting about everything else outside our own little band. RockNet Interview: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, May 1, 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19961114054327/http://www.rocknet.com/may96/soundgar.html, Soundgarden Era

Hate, Happiness, People, Music

“One of the remarkable things about Russ Meyer's films is that they continue to live and play, long after the other work of the soft-core era has been forgotten. That is partly because of their craftsmanship, partly because of Meyer's leading ladies, and partly because of a spirit of paramilitary commitment that can be sensed as the cast and crew struggle through rugged terrain to enact their rural melodramas. But the central reason, I believe, is that Meyer is an auteur whose every frame reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn't allow any space between his work and his dream.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

"Russ Meyer busts sleazy stereotype" Chicago Sun-Times (15 November 1985) http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/russ-meyer-busts-sleazy-stereotype

Dreams, Sense

“There are still a few erect human beings in the socalled world. Proudly and humbly, I say to these human beings:
"O my fellow citizens, many an honest man believes a lie. Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated:now. Fear and hate him were he should be feared and hated:in yourselves.
"Do not hate and fear the artist in yourselves, my fellow citizens. Honour him and love him. Love him truly— do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow.
"Only the artist in yourselves is more truthful than the night."”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams

Love, Hate, Truth, Lie

“When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap, as quoted in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 25, and in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1991) by Ray Monk, p. 244

Pain, People, Art, Way

“The naturalness of life… the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

"A Pictorial Biography" (Tate Publishing, London, 1970)
1961 - 1975

Life, Communication, Nature, Thinking

“I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. 'Who are you?' asks the knight. 'I am Death.' Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.
Images : My Life in Films (1990)

Death, Fools, Feeling, Appearance

“I realized that the image I had been given by my teachers, the scientists.... by their way of looking at Nature, was just another stage setting with all the magnificence and ingenuity that the genius of any artist produces in a work of art. I realized that in my scientific journey I had been under the power of a magic spell of a work of art whose reality was just as true as the verity of the image in an artist's vision.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote from Of divers arts, (1962), p. 21; as cited in International Handbook on Giftedness, Larisa V. Shavinina (2009), p. 862
undated

Art, Way, Nature, Reality

“The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up.”

Howard Raiffa (1924–2016) American academic

Part III, Chapter 10, AMPO Versus City, p. 142.
The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982)

Art, Success

“He [ Marcel Duchamp ] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, by Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 206
Quotes after 1984, posthumous published

Art, Drawing

“All my work is in a way founded on Japanese art... Japanese art, in decadence in its own country, takes root again among the French impressionist artists.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Summer 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 510) p. 32 1880s, 1888

Art, Way, Country

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to artists, 4 April 1999 Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html

Life, Women, Men, Art

“I'm surprised she's friends with the Tories, Helen Bonham-Carter, because she's an artist and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, artists do tend, historically, to be on the left. People on the right tend to be practical, level-headed, capable, unsentimental realists; people on the left tend to be people with dreams, hope, vision, imagination. You have to have imagination on the left, don't you? You have to be able to look at Ed Miliband and imagine that he represents anything other than the death of the post-war socialist dream. Ed Miliband, how did he manage that; how did he make the Labour party less popular than under Blair? That's like catching a baby that's been thrown out of an aeroplane and then tripping up and dropping it in a gutter.”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 3 Episode 3: "Satire"

Death, War, People, Dreams

“I Am the Artist when I am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, back cover

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his picture.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

Soul, Nature, Painting

“I took down my portfolio, to select a drawing to copy in oil. He had never seen my works before, and appeared astonished as his eyes ranged over the sheets. He expressed the warmest admiration, and said, "How hopeless must be the task of my giving any instruction to one who can draw like this?" I pointed out to him that nature is the great study for the artist, and assured him that the reason why my works pleased him was because they are all exact copies of the works of God, — who is the great Architect and perfect Artist; and impressed on his mind this fact, that nature indifferently copied is far superior to the best idealities.”

John James Audubon (1785–1851) American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter

On a meeting with a young artist, Mr. J. B. Kidd, Ch. X, p. 140
The Life and Adventures of John James Audubon, the Naturalist (1868)

God, Nature, Study, Appearance

“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Replying to Listeners" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/replylisteners.html, broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).

Age, Art, Thinking, Country

“At the base of the plane, Styles freelance photographer is down on one knee, going handheld, still in the same Hawaiian shirt. The famously reclusive R. Vaughn Corliss is nowhere in view. Doug Llewellyn’s wardrobe furnished by Hugo Boss. The Malina blanket for the artist’s lap and thighs, however, is the last minute fix of a production oversight, retrieved from the car of an apprentice gaffer whose child is still nursing, and is not what anyone would call an appropriate color or design, and appears unbilled. There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare — the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

"The Suffering Channel", Oblivion: Stories
Short stories

Cars, Color, Problem, Light

“We must take note of the fact that the artist nowadays is occupied with painting flags, posters, pots and pans textiles and things like that. What is referred to as 'artistic work' has on the vast majority of occasions nothing whatever to do with creative effort: and the term 'artistic work' is used in order to demonstrate the 'sacredness' of the work which the artist does at his easel. The conception of 'artistic work' presupposes a distinction between useful and useless work and as there are only a few artists buyers can be found even for their useless products. The artist's work lies beyond the boundaries of the useful and the useless.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Effort, Painting

“I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. … Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Truth, Understanding, Sense, Freedom

“Artists who don't paint aren't artists.”

Charles Thomson (artist) (1953) British artist

Milner, Frank (ed): The Stuckists Punk Victorian [National Museums Liverpool, 2005], p. 134
From The Stuckist Manifesto (1999) co-written with Billy Childish

Painting

“The artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye. I have a habit of looking, and really seeing.”

John Nash (artist)

Cited in: Dr Ronald Blythe (2013) The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958. Chapter 5.

Business, Training

“Nature then, is just nature. I admit I am very impressed with it. The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can do for is to put some order in ourselves. When a man ploughs his field at the right time, it means just that.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's lecture Trans/formation, at Studio 35, 1950.
1950's

Nature, Thinking, Time

“The artist lives only day by day, and is the recipient of the things that surround him; he transposes sensations from outside, according to what the fate reserves him, but transforms them relentlessly and tenaciously, in a manner determined by him alone.”

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) French painter

in Confidences of an artist (1894) published posthumously in Paris in 1922 as part of the book of memoirs To himself; as quoted by Paul Westheim in Confessions of Artists - Letters, Memoirs and Observations of Contemporary Artists, Propyläen Publishing House, Berlin, 1925: p. 82

Fate

“The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Source: Out of the East, Books and Habits, p. 23.

Beauty, Passion, Time

“One of our core beliefs was that significant art could be made by anyone, anywhere and anytime. You didn’t have to live and work in New York City to be an artist. It was in line with the philosophy of Outsider art and movements for artistic "localism."”

Joe Lewis (artist) (1953) American photographer

Walter Robinson. " Joe Lewis: Clairvoynace http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/robinson/robinson8-16-07.asp" at artnet.com, 2015.

Art

“One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.”

Andy Goldsworthy (1956) British sculptor and photographer

He's got the whole world in his hands, The Telegraph (24 March 2007)

Life, Beauty, Hope, Art

“In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Source: Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," 1967, p. 80. Cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/7/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 7

Art, Idea, Decision, Dependency

“On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

quote from 'Guerra sola igiene del mundo', in Edizione Futuriste di Poesia', Milan 1915; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 21
1910's

Death, Health, Youth, Art

“So many really divine individuals humanity has not already produced! Heros in the moral sense, who never got tired to practice renouncement and charity; bright intelligences who opened to the mind new ways and horizons; poets and wonderful artists, who created for him the image of an ideal world, the reflect of perfection. These are as many proofs of the presence of the absolu in the midst of humanity, for him that does not discover the immediate proof of that in himself.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 44.

World, Way, Intelligence, Sense

“In the middle of the work of art, an artist often feels that he is failing. And he starts interfering with his inspiration. That is a mistake. The mistake. It is best to push on through. Such works frequently turn out to be the best. To fail is a very ordinary experience for an artist. To fail and fail and still go on, marks his character. Most people cannot bear to fail, even once. They think of security.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1980 - 2000, The Skowhegan Lecture', 1987

People, Art, Feeling, Thinking

“Here [in the Netherlands] there is absolutely nothing, nowhere and permanently committees to deliver the visual artists some money, since all are hungry. It is such a difficult time for Holland. I had flu, I was very sick and I am still too weak to work.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: Hier [in Nederland] is absoluut niets, nergens geld en voortdurend comités om de beeldende kunstenaars geld te bezorgen, aangezien allen honger lijden. Voor Holland zijn het zo moeilijke tijden. Ik had griep, was erg ziek en ben nog te zwak om te werken.
In her letter to Herwarth Walden, 17 Feb. 1922; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5); Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 183
Jacoba is often ill these last years and rather vulnerable, but nevertheless busy with her designs of ordered glass-windows.
1920's

Money, Time

“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour. The great musicians knew this. w:Beethoven and the rest wrote music — simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that... Art should be independent of all claptrap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
also in a letter to 'The World', London 22 Mai, 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 186
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Love, Art, Music, Sense

“In terms of composition the new plasticism is dualistic. Through the exact reconstruction of cosmic relations it is a direct expression of the universal; by its rhythm, by the material reality of its plastic form, it expresses the artist's individual subjectivity. It thus unfolds before us a whole world of universal beauty without thereby renouncing the human element.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

World, Beauty, Reality, Universe

“A lot of the people who live here [Miami] are island people -- from Cuba, Haiti. People are very vibrant, and color is important living here. You're inspired every day by the sun, the sky, the landscape, the lushness. [Artist Romero Britto's] painting and artwork reflect that.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.nytimes.com (February 2, 2007)
2007, 2008

People, Color, Sun, Painting

“When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Books, Age, World, Thinking

“The simplest means are those which best enable an artist to express himself. His means of expression must derive almost all of necessity from his temperament.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

1905 - 1910, Notes of a Painter' (1908)

“I think Bitcoin allows artists to be compensated for work in a more fair way.”

Ross Mintzer (1987) American musician and performer

‘Bitcoin Band’ to Perform in New York City' in Bitcoin News by Coinsetter(12 December 2014) http://www.coinsetter.com/bitcoin-news/2014/12/12/bitcoin-band-perform-new-york-city-1947 2014

Way, Thinking

“Only a radical cleaning of social and artistic life as, in the domain of art, is already done by Dada, which is anti-sentimental and healthy to the core, since it is anti-art. Only unscrupulously striking down any systematically bred amateurism in any field, can prepare civilization for the 'New Vision's happiness which is greatly and purely alive in a dew people.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from Van Doesburg's article: 'Is a Universal Plastic Notion Possible Today?', as cited in 'Bouwkundig weekblad' [a Dutch architectural magazine], XLI 39, 1920, pp. 230–231
this quote of Theo van Doesburg is one of his earliest Dada expressions
1920 – 1926

Life, Happiness, People, Art

“I do not believe that art must develop on national lines, but I am convinced that there never was and never will be an international art. There is and was French, German, Italian, and Flemish art. But I deny those specific definitions so fashionable with adepts of fascism which make of every country an hermetic cell from which all foreign artists are excluded. [shortly after the end of the German occupation]”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

quote, New York, early 1944; as cited in: Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 430
1940 - 1960

Art, Fashion, Country

“Naturally, in order to find in this break [in the visual perception] with time-honored habits a basis for a new pictorial harmony and a plastic means of dealing with life and movement, there must be an artistic sensibility far in advance of the normal vision of the crowd.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger'; p. 12
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Life, Nature, Time

Quotes about artist page 6

Quotes about artist
page 6