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Artist Quotes

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Artist Quotes

“Sometimes the most interesting visual phenomena occur when you least expect it. Other times, you think youre getting something amazing and the photographs turn out to be boring and predictable. So I think thats why, a long time ago, I consciously tried to let go of artists angst, and instead just hope for the best and enjoy it. I love the journey as much as the destination. If I wasnt a photographer, Id still be a traveler.”

IfsThinkingLongStillsSometimesArtistTurnsEnjoyInterestingJourneyLetting GoLong TimePhotographerPhotographBoringVisualsDestinationTravelerLong Time AgoMost InterestingPredictableAngstHoping For The Best
Author:Michael Kenna
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“If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.”

IfsKnowsMenArtAbleFormArtistOrderNextSocialTechnologyInformationArt IsConsequenceBlowCarefulConvincedCuriousFacultyPrecisePsychicsTranslationsAnticipateNavigation
Book:Understanding media: the extensions of man
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“The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.”

MenWorldGivingDoeArtistLanguageInformationHe ManAwakeReasoningFacultyConceptionComposerMagnetic
Book:The World as Will and Representation
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“When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.”

MenWorldWritingChildrenHas BeensArtRealWholeJoyArtistUniverseBornReligiousLove IsSubjectsPaintingBirthArt IsWhole WorldImpulseNon Religious
Author:Madeleine L'Engle
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“We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct - magnanimity, in short - does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches.”

IfsGivingHumansDoeImportantSoulReasonFeelingsRealityArtistPassionTermMoralBoysGreatnessBalanceIntegrityVicesCreatorIntellectMythRangeAccustomedSpecialistsScoundrelsMagnanimityBoy ScoutMoral Integrity
Author:Jacques Barzun
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“The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.”

WayPersonsArtEnoughArtistInterestingWonderPathWonderfulSubjectsEffectsPolicyProductsMonthsGainsOriginalsRewardsWaveTendenciesOddShockingAbsentClevernessHurdleTidal WavesAbsent Minded
Author:Jacques Barzun
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“The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.”

KnowsMenWorldLittlesArtArtistWonderCenturyPaintingElementsConceptsSightHorseSevenCloudsInevitableColourDimensionsHeroicNineteenth CenturyGreat WomenImpliedWoman ArtistMalenessAbove The Clouds
Book:The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work
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“Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.”

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Book:The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work
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“In other things the knowing artist may Judge better than the people; but a play, (Made for delight, and for no other use) If you approve it not, has no excuse.”

PeopleIfsMayMadePlayUseArtistActingKnowingJudgingDelightExcuseNo Excuses
Book:The Poetical Works of Edmund Waller. From Mr. Fenton's Quarto Edition, 1729. With the Life of the Author ... Embellished with Superb Engravings [including a Portrait.]
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“Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.”

WellsCountryCharacterArtistEnergyPayMistakeAcceptingStyleWillingMaterialsPersonalitySucceedPrejudiceWell BeingSpokesSensationsGreat ArtFanaticismGreat ArtistPay The Price
Author:Cyril Connolly
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“Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.”

KnowsWorldGivingArtRealArtistWaterNaturalAirThis WorldGiving UpArt IsVocationNatural ThingsAir And WaterReal ArtistsMonastic Life
Book:Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations
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“Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.”

ThinkingArtSaidLife IsArtistHoursWorstHairNeededSceneArt IsMadMilesIceFortyWorst ThingsFacilityWristsSkatesThink TwiceGliding
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“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.)”

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Author:Randall Jarrell
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“It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.”

InspirationalMeanArtEndsMovingArtistLiteratureSpeakGoalRolesMankindReaderTasksRidiculousIronyPatheticSpecialistsCarried AwayPathos
Author:Yevgeny Zamyatin
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“The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.”

IfsWritingImportantArtistLettersBest ThingsEditorsSatisfyingPublishMadmenBeing An ArtistSatisfying WorkLetters To The Editor
Book:Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
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“In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality. And I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists.”

PeopleIfsThinkingWorldWayPersonsMadeDifferentPlayRealityFilmUsedArtistFunSidesFantasySawsNiceCrazyChangedColdIntellectualVery GoodCastsVarietyDifferent WaysIronicFrustratedSkepticalManiacsCrazy PeopleBergman
Author:Erland Josephson
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“No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

KindLongFeelingsFormArtistGivenPiecesPaintingWindowBlueRateTeethClarityParisProportionShopsMuseumsFollowersAccurateDefiniteAcademyArdentExhibitionsWorkmenSecond RateCucumbersCubismShop Windows
Author:Marc Chagall
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“But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.”

Has BeensBookIdeasPlayFilmArtistCultureTerribleSpeechPunishmentAttractiveCensorshipAggressionSkepticismSculptureSkepticalCapital Punishment
Author:Rebecca West
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