Artist Quotations - Famous Artists |
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Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep. |
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I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to
paint than to predict what the next painters will
do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of
order is very much in the air. |
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I have always been very much involved in the pseudo
biological cycle of production, consumption and
destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished
by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material
results is the flooding of our world with junk and
rejected odd objects. |
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+ Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit
on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb. |
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+ 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. |
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If a day goes by without my doing something related
to photography, it's as though I've neglected something
essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten
to wake up. |
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+ The job of the artist is always to deepen the
mystery. |
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The holy grail is to spend less time making the
picture than it takes people to look at it. |
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Painting is a language which cannot be replaced
by another language. I don’t know what to say
about what I paint, really. |
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+ ...I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint
their pictures, their work as painters, and their
portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits
ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair.
I myself have never been able to work out why this
happens. |
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Believe it or not, I can actually draw. |
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One of the wonderful things about a museum is how
you're jolted into confronting art from strange
and wonderful civilizations and you look and learn
and expand your horizons. |
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My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art,
which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods
and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance
to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average
grotesque banality in life. |
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I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes
all through me. |
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The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed
world.. the picture.. which, like a book, has the
same interest no matter where it happens to be.
Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal
of time doing nothing but looking, both around him
and inside him. |
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+ Create like a god, command like a king, work like
a slave. |
| Georges
Braque |
:::
cubist painter :::
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+ Art is made to disturb. Science reassures.
There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing
you cannot explain. |
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+ The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives
with burning excitement the best part of childhood. |
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+ Contemporary art challenges us.. it broadens our
horizons. It asks us to think beyond the limits
of conventional wisdom. |
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I believe in working hard. Painting is serious.
A vice, not a play thing. |
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The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has
long been considered as one of the primary elements
of the composition. |
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Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast. |
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+ It took me 40 years to find out that painting
is not sculpture. |
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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. |
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I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because
a photograph doesn't give enough information about
what the person feels. |
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I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter
likes especially to have other painters look at
his or her work is the shared experience of having
pushed paint around. |
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The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered
under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it
is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist
who discovers it. |
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At some point we’ve got to stop asking ourselves
what is the meaning of everything, maybe it’s
not so very important what it means. It’s probably
more important what the sense of it is.. they are
two very basic and different things. |
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I decided to be more brave about what was coming
out. I used to draw that stuff in secret and throw
it away. Flush it down the toilet. I wanted to see
what the readership could take. |
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It is not enough to give signals. Things can only
ever last if they have functioned as signs. |
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+ At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven
I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been
growing steadily ever since. |
| Jacques-Louis
David |
:::
famous artist :::
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+ To give body and perfect form to your thought,
this alone is what it is to be an artist. |
| Giorgio
de Chirico |
:::
famous artist :::
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+ To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape
all human limits: logic and common sense will only
interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it
will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams. |
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+ Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to
have it at 50. |
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+ Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are,
as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the
canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical.
He acts from or upon other artists. |
| Eugene
Delacroix |
:::
famous artist :::
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+ What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires
their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession
with the idea that what has already been said is
still not enough. |
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In a successful painting everything is integral..
all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove
an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness. |
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+ My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily
about drawing. It's about making the best kind of
image I can make, it's about talking as clearly
as I can. |
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It's all the same to me. I must keep the first impression
fresh. If it is lost, I must find it again. |
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A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful
attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of
him, but one tries to create something which is,
in itself, a living thing. |
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I constantly have to negotiate with my doubts. |
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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.'
It's here, art's everywhere. It's how you use your
eyes. It's about the enjoyment of visual things.
And it's certainly not for any one group of people. |
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What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises
me, that it violates my customary valuations of
things and offers me other, unexpected ones. |
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I have forced myself to contradict myself in order
to avoid conforming to my own taste. |
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What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters
always insist on their connection with the visible
reality, while the so called figurative artists
insist that what they really care about, is the
abstract qualities of life. |
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+ 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. |
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At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that
no one in the world has ever made something this
beautiful and important. |
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+ 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. |
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Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support
for their new works collaborate with the creator. |
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+ We never really know what stupidity is
until we have experimented on ourselves. |
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The trouble with flowers is that invariably, when
I'm ready to photograph them, they are not in season. |
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I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement
of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer
a sketch into a model into the building. |
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The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays
the part of antennae making life possible for people
and life itself is inside the skull. |
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Some people would say my paintings show a future
world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. |
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A clergyman once said to us, "Jealousy is a
bad thing. But I must confess that I am sometimes
jealous of the artist because the artist is closer
to creation". (George) |
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Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful
thing to do.. making life flow more easily.. but
art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps
change direction.. they are completely different. |
| Francisco
Goya |
:::
spanish master :::
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+ Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces
impossible monsters; united with it, she is the
mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. |
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+ You are lost the instant you know what the result
will be. |
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My life changed when I was able to not only get
seated in nice restaurants, I was given free appetizers.
That was like, "Oh, my God, I've arrived." |
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+ I am a night painter, so when I come into the
studio the next morning the delirium is over. I
come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in
to see what happened the night before. And the feeling
is one of, "My God, did I do that?". |
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+ My contribution to the world is my ability to
draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people
as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still
basically the same as it has been since prehistoric
times. It brings together man and the world. It
lives through magic. |
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I think art is good at looking back and looking
forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on.
At the end of the day, people are more important
than paintings. |
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+ 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. |
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+ A work of art is a world in itself reflecting
senses and emotions of the artist's world. |
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I prefer every time a picture composed and painted
outdoors. The thing is done without your knowing
it. |
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+ Great art is the outward expression of an inner
life in the artist. |
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+ I tend to like things that already exist. |
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I didn't want to get into something which is played
out and narrow. I want to do as I like, invent my
own interests. |
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+ I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone,
because I am the person I know best. |
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+ An empty canvas is a living wonder.. far lovelier
than certain pictures. |
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+ To me, it's not work. When I draw and I write,
I find it relaxing. It's not like 9-to-5, where
a man goes to a job and he isn't really interested
in the job. Luckily, I get paid for doing what I'd
do for nothing. |
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We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it
as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness. |
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I believe art has to take responsibility but it
should not give up being art. |
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What I paint touches on foundational life values.
Home, family, peacefulness. And one of the messages
I try to constantly get across is slow it down and
enjoy every moment. |
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I am rather like a travelling salesman. I deal in
ideas. I do much more for people than just paint
them pictures. |
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My paintings are allegories not portraits. |
| R.B.
Kitaj quotes |
:::
artist :::
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+ There are some people who don't like museums because
they think of them as tombs, or something negative.
I've always loved them. They are to me lighthouses
of utopianism and social well-being. |
