Artist Quotes

Vincent van Gogh

Salvador Dali

Pablo Picasso

Andy Warhol

Rembrandt

Peter Paul Rubens

Henri Matisse

Painting directly from nature is difficult as things do not remain the same; the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind.

Theodore Robinson

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. [It is] a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

On his 1985 book, In The American West

I strive to express the spiritual nature of the Universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Richard Pousette-Dart

Become one with eternity.
Become part of your environment.
Take off your clothes.
Forget yourself. Make love.
Self-destruction is the only
way to peace.

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there – even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

I like church. It's empty when I go. I walk around. There are so many beautiful Catholic churches in New York.

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

William Merritt Chase

What is Drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Letter to his brother Theo

Vincent van Gogh

Art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

John Singer Sargent

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Annie Leibovitz

What is called a sincere work [of art] is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

To be a surrealist... means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

The figure is still the only thing I have faith in in terms of how much emotion it's charged with and how much subject matter is there.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.