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.

There is never a question of what to paint but only how to paint.

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.

I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn't know how to be my own age. I had never felt that way before, but now I feel like that a lot.

Lynne Rae Perkins

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

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

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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."

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

Chris Priestley

Does any sane man imagine that the church could cease to be missionary and remain the church?

In our young days, when Modigliani and I first came to Paris, in 1906, nobody was very clear about ideas. But unconsciously, we knew quite a lot of things, of which we became aware later on.

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

I want to express the utmost intensity of the color, bring out the quality, make it expressive.

Adolph Gottlieb

Wait a minute, can't you? I've only got three hands.

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

I believe in goodness
Mercy and charity
I believe in a universal spirit
I believe in casting bread
Upon the waters

I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment.

It is really too ridiculous for a reasonably intelligent person to expose himself to this kind of administrative caprice.

Frédéric Bazille

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.

The warm green of the grass, sprinkled with flowers of many hues, is a carpet whereon we walk with noiseless tread.

The Little House was very happy as she sat on the hill and watched the countryside around her. She watched the sun rise in the morning and she watched the sun set in the evening. Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before... but the Little House stayed just the same.

Virginia Lee Burton

There is no communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can ask no question, and he makes no statement; he offers no information, and his work cannot be used. It is the end product which counts.

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.

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

On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside.

Herbert Ponting

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.