American Artist Quotes

Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.

Charles Fletcher Lummis

I've found it's better to talk to the machine and hang up if I get the person.

Cathy Guisewite

I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.

If I had a hammer, I'd build a city on stilts so my feet would stay dry when God's wine glass tilts. If I had a shovel, I'd dig a hole in the dirt and I'll be hiding when his drunken stupor lands upon earth

I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill.

As for what l'm making now, perhaps it's art; but if it isn't, at least it's something else equally interesting to me!

By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet.Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil. What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.

Robert Adams (photographer)

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

The time approaches when men must take their choice between quiescent, immobile faith and ever-advancing Science - faith, with its medieval consolations, Science, which is incessantly scattering its material blessings in the pathway of life, elevating the lot of man in this world, and unifying the human race.

John William Draper

We do not claim that punning is legitimate wit. Wit consists in combination of ideas, punning in combination of words only. We wonder at the one, but we laugh at the drollery of the other — as the world goes a pun is regarded as an imponderable commodity, all know the rank it holds in the order of pure intellect.

There is never a question of what to paint but only how to paint.

The point in all cases is that the deities must be made to laugh.

I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search...

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

Jerome Liebling

The star system has us making pictures with personalities rather than stories, sacrificing everything in order to keep some old bags playing young women.

Our agricultural colleges continue to graduate specialists who become vocational agricultural teachers in the schools, and county agents, who go forth to extol the virtues of poison insecticides, herbicides, and commercial fertilizers.

I TOOK THE PIECES YOU THREW AWAY AND
PUT THEM TOGATHER [sic] BY NIGHT AND DAY
WASHED BY RAIN DRIED BY SUN A MILLION PIECES ALL IN ONE

Success based on anything but internal fulfillment is bound to be empty.

Martha Friedman

Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile... I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space.

Only one who has known how troubled life can be, has a real appreciation of it when it is good

Ludwig Bemelmans

The running shoe... could be called the Swiss Army knife of footwear... What appeal is there to a shoe whose only selling point is comfort?

People like me, who care about printing, constitute the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation.

Expatriate? It appears to me that in order to be an expatriate one has to be, in some manner, driven from one's fatherland, from one's native land.... One must belong before one may then not belong.

Beauford Delaney

The worship leader God is after is the one whose heart is captured by Him.

I absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.