Art Quotes
To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as a painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. --HENRY MILLER
Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That’s not an answer.
There isn’t any answer.
How long hasn’t there been any answer?
As long as I can remember.
And how long have you written?
As long as I can remember.
I mean poetry.
So do I.
Tell me, doesn’t your painting interfere with your writing?
Quite the contrary: they love each other dearly.
--E.E. CUMMINGS
Language is a detriment, an earthbound limitation from which the poet suffers more than anyone else. At times he can actually hate it, denounce it, and execrate it---or rather hate himself for being born to work with this miserable instrument. He thinks with envy of the painter whose language------color------is instantly comprehensible to everyone from the North Pole to Africa.--HERMANN HESSE
We ought to talk less and draw more. I, personally, should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. --JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "ART," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." --EDGAR ALLAN POE
What am I alone, an isolated individual, a lost atom, a speck of dust amidst so many whirlwinds? A nonentity. But by associating myself with you, by pressing with my left hand the hand of an artist, with my right hand the hand of a prince, I become a link in the golden chain which connects the past with the future. --ALEXANDRE DUMAS
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again, since it is life. --WILLIAM FAULKNER
I hate my own period with all my heart. Today man is dying of thirst. There is only one problem, General, only one problem in the whole world. It is the need to restore a spiritual meaning to men’s lives, and to reawaken their capacity for spiritual disquiet. . . It is impossible to survive on refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crossword puzzles, you see! It is impossible! It is impossible to live without poetry and color and love.--ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
If any man has any poetry in him he should paint it, for it has all been said and written, and they have hardly begun to paint it. Every man who has that gift should paint. --DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
"You don’t understand, Billy," said White, with an uneasy laugh. "Some of us fellows who try to paint have big notions about Art. I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet." --O.HENRY
And here let me explain what the artist is. . . The artist, any man born artist as I was, and caught as I was and, I dare say, as all such men are caught, has this hunger always to remake, to recreate. There is this shapeless thing all about him everywhere and the fingers ache to reshape it." --SHERWOOD ANDERSON
The life that is lived in this solitude, this beautiful life is reached in our best pictures and verses, and this in the end shared with others who take the book and the picture to their solitude, and live it over again.--VACHEL LINDSAY
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation tot he dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.--T.S. ELIOT
It needs a certain purity of spirit to be an artist, of any sort. . .An artist may be a profligate and, from the social point of view, a scoundrel. But if he can paint a nude woman, or a couple of apples, so that they are a living image, then he was pure in spirit, and, for the time being, his was the kingdom of heaven. This is the beginning of all art, visual or literary or musical: be pure in spirit. It isn’t the same as goodness. It is much more difficult and nearer the divine. The divine isn’t only good, it is all things.--D.H. LAWRENCE
Art Consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite...--HENRY MILLER