Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
One of the cardinal pleasures of life is offered to man by works of art. Art, at its highest potential, as the projection of things as they might and ought to be, can provide man with an invaluable emotional fuel. But, again, the kind of art works one responds to, depends on one's deepest values and premises.
We must teach ourselves…to see the beauty of the commonplace. It is so much greater to make much out of little than to make little out of much - Better to make a big thing out of a little subject than to make a little thing out of a big one.
...I think the biggest thrill in life is to have a dream or imagine something and then get to see it be real.
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
We have art to save ourselves from the truth.
Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God; Referred to herself, she is genius...Our art leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and the dust which we make.
Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. The number of beautiful combinations is far less than the number of total combinations. Similarly, seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to be asymmetrical.
There is a fine line between sensitivity and sentimentality…Sensitivity seems to touch and uplift the listener, while sentimentality goes one step too far and plays on the listener's emotions in an uncomfortable way.
Experience has taught me that the more specifically I phrase the requests and instructions that I direct to my subconscious, the more successful the exercise will become.
I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly. Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.
Selection and combination are learned from nature herself, who constantly presents us with compositions of her own, far more beautiful than the happiest arranged by human skill.
The true artist works in great gusts of effort, and in smaller gusts of apparent lassitude. He is not lying about waiting for some inspiration. He is in the travail of the dreamer entering into expression.
The same people that have stripped us of our identity, and labeled us as a color, have told us what it means to be black, and the vernacular that we are supposed to have.
This is what Mormons call “gospel art,” and they revere it less for its artistic merits and more for its religious purpose — to convey the message and doctrine of Mormonism, which binds its 15 million members worldwide.
Yes, it is kitsch, but so what? They are not about artistic expression, but about community, about prayer, about devotional feeling. Theses images are the intimate symbols of the community of feeling to which (Mormons) belong.
Mormons are not the only religious group to bring a specific gaze to religious art, he said, but they bring one that is different from other Protestant groups that have embraced new forms of art and media.
...the question of what one should make is always superior, in point or order and logic, to the question of how to make it.
The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind.
Pursuing your art can limit your income - though hopefully only in the early stages. While you need to be responsible and thus perhaps move toward earning money from your art, you also need support from people who get it (that you are a talented - let's hope - driven artist or writer). Gravitate toward people who can be supportive of artists. You will find it helps your art tremendously.
The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism.
There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
Like to do your work as much as a dog likes to gnaw a bone and go at it with equal interest and exclusion of everything else.
The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through.
The work is done when that special thing has been said.
No feature should be started until you have fully comprehended its character and have established in your mind the manner of its full accomplishment.
The picture must not become a patchwork of parts of various moods. The original mood must be held to.
All the beauty that can exist in the background rests in its relation to the figure.
We are instinctively blind to what is not relative. We are not cameras. We select. We do this always when we are not painting. When you are sitting in conversation with a young girl and are thinking the while how beautiful she is, suddenly stop and ask yourself what has been her background.
We must paint only what is important to us, must not respond to outside demands. They do not know what they want, or what we have to give.
If a man has the soul of an artist he needs a mastery of all the means of expression so that he may command them, for with his soul in activity he has much to say.
The whole fact is that art and science are so close akin that they might very well be lumped together. They are certainly necessary to each other and the delights of either pursuit should satisfy any man.
I am not interested in art as a means of making a living, but I am interested in art as a means of living a life.
Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money. There are ever so many better ways.
Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money. There are ever so many better ways...If one is a painter this purest freedom must exist at the time of painting. This is as much as to say that a painter may give up his hope of making his living as a painter but must make it some other way. This is generally true, although some do, by a freak of appreciation, make enough while going their way to live sufficiently well. Perhaps this happens, but I am not sure but that there is some curtailing of the purity of the freedom.
I was once asked by a young artist whether he could hope to make any money out of his work if he continued in his particular style of painting. He happened to be a man of considerable talent and had great enthusiasm for his work. But I knew there was no public enthusiasm for such work. I remembered he had told me that before he got really into art he had made a living by designing labels for cans, tomato cans and the like. I advised him to make tomato-can labels and live well that he might be free to paint as he liked.
Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.
Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money. There are ever so many better ways...If one is a painter this purest freedom must exist at the time of painting. This is as much as to say that a painter may give up his hope of making his living as a painter but must make it some other way. This is generally true, although some do, by a freak of appreciation, make enough while going their way to live sufficiently well. Perhaps this happens, but I am not sure but that there is some curtailing of the purity of the freedom. I was once asked by a young artist whether he could hope to make any money out of his work if he continued in his particular style of painting. He happened to be a man of considerable talent and had great enthusiasm for his work. But I knew there was no public enthusiasm for such work. I remembered he had told me that before he got really into art he had made a living by designing labels for cans, tomato cans and the like. I advised him to make tomato-can labels and live well that he might be free to paint as he liked.
The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea. He should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express. If his will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.
Trading art has always been a pastime of the wealthy. Much of what counts for art history consists of flattering portrayals of the rich and powerful, and artists have long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe called the Art Mating Ritual – attracting the interest of wealthy patrons and conservative institutions, while simultaneously presenting as Bohemians and renegades.
"I knew that Humbolt would die soon, because I had seen him on the street two months before. And he had death all over him. He didn't see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had brought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch." James Atlas (Biographer): Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913 in New York, and was appraised by T.S Elliot as the poet of his generation. This amazing, sudden, precocious recognition. But Delmore also became a symbol of the artist in America who's doomed by the pressures of capitalism and has to be crazy because he's a poet. Saul Bellow: People like that have no proper place in American life. They just don't. This is a high tech, high finance, rationally organized kind of society in which people normally don't have such motives as Humbolt had. They just don't. He himself looks upon himself as an alien object, because he was aware that he does not guide his life by the standards that prevail. But in his saner moments, I would have thought that he would say that art was something that life couldn't do without. Uh, there was not this sort of divorce at at all. But that um, um, art was one of the powers that made life life. I think we all believe that. I think I still do.
Expensive pictures are primarily what economists call positional goods — things that are valuable largely because other people can’t have them. The painting on the wall, or the sculpture in the garden, is intended to say as much about its owner’s bank balance as about his taste. With most kit a higher price reduces demand. But art, sports cars and fine wine invert the laws of economics. When the good that is really being purchased is evidence that the buyer has forked out a bundle, price spikes cause demand to boom.
Precisely because art is political, and can reach across divides, emphasise commonalities and foster understanding
Today’s Russian artists are one thing; Russian art is another. Shunning the country’s back catalogue means giving up a guide to the darkness, and out of it. Cancel Dostoyevsky, as an Italian university threatened to, and you miss peerless insights into nihilism and violence. Blacklist Tchaikovsky—or Shostakovich—and you silence a beauty wrenched from the chokehold of repression. Turn away from Malevich’s paintings, and you forgo his urgent vision of a world cracked open. Banishing Tolstoy means losing a timeless prophet of peace.
If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls.
Where simplicity prevails angels hail.
Imitate nothing or nobody, paint all people and things as you see them.
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
The thing about Deford Bailey, Ray Charles, and Charlie Pride, the two or three black people who were known to be in country music. They were accepted. The musicians accepted them at a time when the culture did not accept. There's a truth in the music. And it's too bad that we, as a culture, have not been able to address that truth. That's the shame of it. The art tells more of the tale of us coming together.