Artist Quotes

What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object — silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing — an ancient tree — no thinking — not to think is central to the activity.

An eye critically nice can only be formed by observing well-colored pictures with attention.

Joshua Reynolds

Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!

A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth.

I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse

Just when you think you can't go on, somewhere a little light comes on.

The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization.

Jacob Getlar Smith

One of our core beliefs was that significant art could be made by anyone, anywhere and anytime. You didn't have to live and work in New York City to be an artist. It was in line with the philosophy of Outsider art and movements for artistic "localism."

I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.

F I was an Optician, - I think that I would almost as willingly - Waltz blindfold and barefoot among 9 Red hot Ploughshares laid at unequal distances from each other, - as have All my Telescopes tried by that truly troublesome test a Fixed Star.

William Kitchiner

John asked me to dance and I nearly died. Bingo! I then amazed myself by being very cool, calm and collected outwardly-inside I was out of this world. The dance was slow and smoochy. I was aloof and John, I think, was slightly embarrassed. It was all very painful and beautiful at the same time. The remaining students were looking on with puzzled expressions at such an unlikely combination.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

When you are interested in life more than you are in painting, then your paintings can come to life.

Anxiety and fear produce energy. Where we focus that energy noticeably affects the quality of our lives: focus on the solution, not the problem.

Walter Inglis Anderson

Fundamentally, the camera is nothing more than a light-tight box, having an arrangement for holding a light-sensitive substance (plate or film) and a device (lens or pinhole) for projecting on this sensitive substance an image of objects external to the camera.

Paul Lewis Anderson

Sculpture is the essence of things, the essence of nature, that which is perpetually human.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck

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

Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.

Remember, as each man and woman is a microcosm reflecting the larger natural world, so healing of the self is also a healing for the world. As above, so below.

Some of the greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.

I've painted for a very long time, but I don't get tired or bored by it; I love to do it. If I don't paint one day, I don't feel well physically or mentally. My eyes bother me when I don't paint. But when I paint a full day, I feel satisfied and everything seems to be OK. I would never stop, never retire. I don't see how people can retire; I don't understand that. My brother Moses died while he was painting. He was actually working on a painting, and the last words he said were to the model: "Phoebe, don't frown." Then he died. He worked to the very last minute.

If it hurt me to have to give up a painting I figured it had to hurt them to write the check. That's how I came up with the price for my work.

You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important.

There comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse.