American Artist Quotes

This everyday world affects the way art is created as much as it conditions its response.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

Ellsworth Kelly

Some is more equal than others, as is well known. It ain't that your majority is outnumbered, you're just out-surrounded.

When Jackson talked about painting he didn't usurp anything that wasn't himself. He didn't want to change anything, he wasn't using any outworn attitude about it, he was always himself. He just wanted to be in it because he loved it. The response in the person's mind to that mysterious thing that has happened before has nothing to do with 'who did it first'. Tomlin however, did hear these voices and in reference to his early work and its relation to Braque, I like him for that. He was not an academician of Cubism even then; he was an extremely personal and sensitive artist.

Painting, for me, when it really 'happens,' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon - as say, a lettuce leaf. By 'happens,' I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.

The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe. In the end, Religion will kill us all.

I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.

Men may control the free world, but women control the boobs.

As far as I'm concerned, I want to remain the mean little man I always was.

I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.

Jacques Lipchitz

I strive to make my art bear the same relation to painting that polyphony bears to music. Illustrative music is a thing of the past: it has become abstract and purely aesthetic, dependent for its effect upon rhythm and form.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

Having a sincere desire to want growth does not mean at that point you are committing yourself to growth.

Eugene J. Martin

Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?

I know how to tell a story, but there's a deeper thing I'm trying to get to now that can't be expressed with a caption.

Why can't a Democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'The catcher in the rye' and 'Harry Potter'?

Look around you. Everywhere. They are there. In every home - lurking in dark corners … small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns. They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!

On children

John Blair Moore

I would never sit back in a rocking chair, waiting for someone to help me.

In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted.

Robert Motherwell

If it hurt me to have to give up a painting I figured it had to hurt them to write the check. That's how I came up with the price for my work.

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself.

Who is an artist? I say we take a title. No one gives it to us. We make our lives.

Louise Nevelson

I believe in goodness
Mercy and charity
I believe in a universal spirit
I believe in casting bread
Upon the waters

My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Audiences want to support artists. Which is pretty much how it's always been except during the last 100 years where it's turned into this really vicious, cutthroat, nasty business with all these blood-thirsty, parasitic middle-men. But historically, artists were relatively poor and supported directly by their audiences. There's a great book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde. You know, art is a gift and it turns out the audience is happy to give back.