Artist Quotes

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.

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

Joshua Reynolds

Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.

I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders...The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums.

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.

No leader, however great a personality he may be, is as important to a people as their own intellectual development.

George William Russell

Not all the war correspondents [in Afghanistan] were nervous. My wife asked a journalist covering the Khanabad front why he didn't wear a bulletproof vest. (At $1,200 each, we couldn't afford them.) "Are you kidding?" the heavyset photographer for The San Jose Mercury News replied as he wiped his brow. "It's too hot out here."

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."

Meditation takes chaos and begins magically morphing it into nothing.

Michael Scott Gallegos

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

Thornton Willis

Anything can be any color at any time depending on what color everything else is at the time.

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

Jacob Getlar Smith

One could think of a person who seems to have two opposing and contradictory sides to his personality; but it turns out that in the end the two sides are complementary. The same happens with an artist's work: deep down, what appear as contradictory sides are merely different registers, different aspects of the reality that the artist inhabits

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Istanbul these days has as much dynamism as New York.

I hope the time will never come when I shall feel satisfied. To reach the goal of one's ambitions must be tragic.

I wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.

Providence The will of God acting together with human will. But he respects our will absolutely. He does not force. Love never forces. It only invites.... There is a war between good and

Michael O'Brien (Canadian author)

I want to take retirement rather than feel as if it's taking me unawares. Maybe even seize it joyously. But at least behold it without looking back so longingly that I turn into a pillar of regret.

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

Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers.

Chris Priestley

If the glass there in front of me astounds me more than all the glasses I've seen in painting, and if I even think that the greatest architectural wonder of the world couldn't affect me more than this glass, it's really not worth while going to the Indies to see some temple or other when I have as much and more right in front of me.

Alberto Giacometti

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

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

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.