Artist Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.

Until the war [between France and Germany] as you know, my life was a mess. I wasted it. It was only at l'Estaque, when (1870-1871) I thought things over, that I really understood Pissarro, a painter like myself... He was a determined man. I was overcome by a passion for work. It wasn't that I hadn't been working before, I was always working. But what I always missed, you know, was a comrade like you..

We love a genius for what he leaves and mourn him for what he takes away

Thomas Gainsborough

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

Alexander Calder

Writers have written eloquently of the joys of walking, but the magic of walking is something more than pleasure. It is a true magic, a psychophysical alchemy, which transforms the body and the mind.

How lovely are the portals of the night, when stars come out to watch the daylight die.

What is spiritual experience? A snowflake melting, a bee sucking honey, a fat man at a traffic light. Trivia.

Frederick Franck

Much fruitless speculation has been spent over supposed hidden meanings in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark. The inclination to search for these was strictly natural, though the search was destined to fail.

It will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing.

Umberto Boccioni

The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.

You know what they say - the sweetest word in the English language is revenge.

Why have our standards fallen so low? Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. There are no longer any natural constraints which depend on materials such as wood and stone. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.

The attitude and capacity of the factory, the old metal table and the new ideas of the wooden furniture quickly and naturally suggested the possibility of metal furniture.

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock.

Vito Acconci's extraordinary career—poetry, art, architecture: a sort of triathlon of the arts—began in the Bronx, where as an aspiring author of seven years he wrote stories about cowboys and athletes. At his Catholic college, he published sexy stuff about priests and nuns that got the school magazine banned for three issues running. He went on to write fiction in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. But when he came back to New York in the early '60s, something changed, and he began writing poems. Highly conceptual constructions, they did not tell stories, express feelings, or evoke a fictional world. They were not representational. Maybe you could call them presentational: this is a word, this is a sentence, you are reading.

Shelley Jackson

In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson's work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson's work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.

Edward Allington

And see the rivers how they run Through woods and meads, in shade and sun, Sometimes swift, sometimes slow, Wave succeeding wave, they go A various journey to the deep, Like human life to endless sleep!

Istanbul these days has as much dynamism as New York.