Artist Quotes

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.

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.

Paintings may not have nearly the power to convert people that the printed or spoken word has, but each man has his part to play in the human and divine drama - some persons just a few lines, others whole pages. To refuse to play one's role at all is not the answer. It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

William Kurelek

I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them.

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.

Crows know the value of organization, and are as well drilled as soldiers - very much better than some soldiers, in fact, for crows are always on duty, always at war, and always dependent on each other for life and safety.

Ernest Thompson Seton

My butterfly-net and pocket magnifying-glass are rare companions for a walk in the country.

William Hamilton Gibson

Everything is love. "HEAVEN ON EARTH" our idea of heaven has been formed by painting and nothing else. I love pure, bright colours, their intellectual clarity of expression conveying nothing but feeling. Painting - the inspired animation of the surface.

Stefan Szczesny

Painting, for me, when it really 'happens,' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon - as say, a lettuce leaf. By 'happens,' I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.

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

Success based on anything but internal fulfillment is bound to be empty.

Martha Friedman

I don't care for Lady Macbeth in the streetwalking scene.

Edward Linley Sambourne

I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business... Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism.

Pray for the repose of his soul. He was so tired.

Frederick Rolfe

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.

Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual', professional & commercialized culture... PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART,... promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals... FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.

George Maciunas

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

Wilhelm Lehmbruck

Never plan a picnic' Father said. 'Plan a dinner, yes, or a house, or a budget, or an appointment with the dentist, but never, never plan a picnic.

Elizabeth Enright

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

Adolph Gottlieb

That's right! You're watching the DVD! So, the coolness of what the bowing man is doing is self-evident to you!

As paradoxical as it may seem a great sculptor is as much a colourist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one, as much as the most charming etchings.

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.

They'll all pee blue for one week to ten days, for about the duration of the show. The first opening I've enjoyed!

Making a cartoon occupied usually about three full days, two spent in labour and one in removing the appearance of labour.

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