American Artist Quotes

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.

For my generation, Judd posed the same problem as Picasso did for the Abstract Expressionists; you either had to go over, under, around, or through him. Conceptual, process, and Earth Art, each in their own way, constituted a rejection of the 'speciﬁc object'.

The business of the state trying to legislate modesty is relatively both an infantile and ridiculous procedure. Of course, it is true that the more things are secreted the more intriguing they become, because it is always the forbidden that has the strongest appeal. Nudity is a state of fact - lewdity a state of mind.

Paul Outerbridge

Happiness is a sort of perfume. You can't pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.

James Van Der Zee

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

I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them.

Labor has been one of the most important aspects of our development.... It isn't grand, but it is important and it is a thing that we should be proud of, because we have that part of our life that has gone into the building of America. Not only of ourselves, but in the building of American life.

On why he became a vegetarian:

We were selling books, and right next to us was an old man. [...] he was a holistic nutritionist, and he was talking to us about how you shouldn't really eat animals and things of that nature … and he pulled up his shirt and the man had the abs of a 15-year-old. He says to us [...] How old do you think I am? And we thought he was about 50 years old, and he's like, I'm 86 years old. … We looked at each other, me and my friends, and we were, like, when we're 86, we want to be like that …. So that's what started it.

Jeru the Damaja

Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail.

Fairfield Porter

Experience has shown that the more fascinating the subject, the less observant the photographer.

Andreas Feininger

Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.

In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord... all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings.

George Herriman

Art ain't about paint. It ain't about canvas. It's about ideas.

It was great fun, to learn anew. You think you know enough, but you don't. You must open up; let it in. be receptive, admit what you don't know, which few are willing to do. Start from square one. Again!

A lot of good and regular art gets made because of who you talk to. No one is immune to human contact and art is not made in a vacuum.

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

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.

There is much wisdom that may be learned before a peat fire.

Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle

A nursery rhyme from the American Psychiatric Society:
Monday's kid is passive-aggressive
Tuesday's kid is compulsive-obsessive
Wednesday's kid is hypochondriacal
Thursday's kid is just plain maniacal
Friday's kid is anal-retentive
Saturday's kid is too non-attentive
But the kid who's born on the Sabbath day
defies diagnosis in every way.

Jazz is my religion and it alone I do dig the jazz clubs are my houses of worship

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

Jerome Liebling

How to paint the landscape: First you make your bow to the landscape. Then you wait, and if the landscape bows to you, then, and only then, can you paint the landscape.

It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.

I want to express the utmost intensity of the color, bring out the quality, make it expressive.

Adolph Gottlieb