Artist Quotes

Vincent van Gogh

Salvador Dali

Pablo Picasso

Andy Warhol

Rembrandt

Peter Paul Rubens

Henri Matisse

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Georges Rouault

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

I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.

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

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

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.

One of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you.

Vincent van Gogh

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

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.

It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.

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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

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