Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
20th-century Artist Quotes
Source
Report...
It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.
Bridget Riley
Source
Report...
The amount of time it takes to provide is threefold for families whom have to make due with very little. … Children from poor households learn to have very low expectations of themselves and their future because they believe that the world around them doesn't expect much from them either. In India, children of the lower castes are taught still today that once poor always poor so they don't think to become doctors or lawyers because their last name may not be Gupta or whatever other typically higher caste name there may be in India.
Manuel Rivera-Ortiz
Source
Report...
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers... only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.
Norman Rockwell
Source
Report...
Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.
James Rosenquist
Source
Report...
I've never claimed that this is investment art. When we first started out, all the art colleges and universities across the country would sort of badmouth what we were doing. It's funny that a lot of them now are sending us letters saying, 'We may not totally agree with the way you paint, but we appreciate what you're doing, because you're sending literally thousands of people into art colleges.'
Bob Ross
Source
Report...
Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
Mark Rothko
Source
Report...
I paint what you love to hate and what you hate to love.
Riiko Sakkinen
Source
Report...
Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... How can I ever forget them...
Charles M. Schulz
Source
Report...
The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes... and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.
Maurice Sendak
Source
Report...
If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work.
Richard Serra
Source
Report...
The old art depicted space as uniform and enclosed. The new art perceives space as organic and open. The old art was an object. The new art is a system. The configuration of the movement is more important than the shape of the object. The message of a kinetic and luminic work is the light and movement it produces. It has no other message. It has no meaning besides movement.
Willoughby Sharp
Source
Report...
Stop trying to impress some art-school teacher with a stick up his butt whose opinions you never respected from the time you entered his class until you left it 10 years ago. Draw like you.
Dave Sim
Source
Report...
There is no unity or organization or even aesthetic unity [in Abstract Expressionism / New York School (art)], but we do have a very strong bond in our defense, but we also are strongest in our own individual identity. Our effort, I think, is all shooting off in independent directions. And the artists themselves will not admit to the existence of the New York School. They won't admit to any classification, and most of those painters known as Abstract Expressionists are the first to say they are not.
David Smith
Source
Report...
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
Stevie Smith
Source
Report...
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Robert Smithson
Source
Report...
I've painted for a very long time, but I don't get tired or bored by it; I love to do it. If I don't paint one day, I don't feel well physically or mentally. My eyes bother me when I don't paint. But when I paint a full day, I feel satisfied and everything seems to be OK. I would never stop, never retire. I don't see how people can retire; I don't understand that. My brother Moses died while he was painting. He was actually working on a painting, and the last words he said were to the model: "Phoebe, don't frown." Then he died. He worked to the very last minute.
Raphael Soyer
Source
Report...
When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless. But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.
Stanley Spencer
Source
Report...
A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.
Art Spiegelman
Source
Report...
I was in a slightly befuddled state by this time and the potent combination of watery beer and whiskey was bringing on a severe attack of drawing, as always happens when I start seeing unusual faces through a haze of controlled drinking. My body becomes a protective casing and lets me observe through the two keyholes on the front of my head.
Ralph Steadman
Source
Report...
The observer usually will see what his fears and hopes and learning teach him to see. But if he can escape these demands that hold up a mirror to himself, then perhaps some of the implications of the work may be felt. But whatever is seen of felt it should be remembered that for me these paintings had to be something else. It is the price one has to pay for clarity when one's means are honoured only as an instrument of seduction or assault.
Clyfford Still
Source
Report...
It is not a question so much of a 'tree like a figure' or a 'root like a figure' - it is a question of bringing out the anonymous personality of these things.
Graham Sutherland
Source
Report...
What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object — silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing — an ancient tree — no thinking — not to think is central to the activity.
Patrick Swift
Source
Report...
Everything is love. "HEAVEN ON EARTH" our idea of heaven has been formed by painting and nothing else. I love pure, bright colours, their intellectual clarity of expression conveying nothing but feeling. Painting - the inspired animation of the surface.
Stefan Szczesny
Source
Report...
The artist may rightly venture the opinion that he does not convey ideas, does not preach, nor that he intents to convert people by using mass communication techniques... Better than handing out all kinds of wise advice, he could show life itself; he could awake forces lying dormant in everybody, he could launch an invitation to create direct and personal experiences.
Antoni Tàpies
Source
Report...
Sure he (Fred Astaire) was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards... and in high heels.
Bob Thaves
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Quote of the day
The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.
Bruce Catton
Related Quotes
19th-century Artists
20th-century Artists
21st-century Artists
Artist Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes