Artist Quotes

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.

Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure as he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.

Matthieu Ricard

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.

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

I strive to make my art bear the same relation to painting that polyphony bears to music. Illustrative music is a thing of the past: it has become abstract and purely aesthetic, dependent for its effect upon rhythm and form.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright

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

Pictures just come to my mind and I tell my heart to go ahead.

He [Otto Mueller] himself omitted certain things in his pictures that his contemporaries deemed to be of importance, in order to capture the essence.... with the greatest possible simplicity.

When you see 300 people naked in Grand Central Station, or a river of flesh flowing through the beauty aisles of Selfridges department store, it makes you think about all sorts of social and political issues.

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

Joshua Reynolds

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

I'm a sucker for tragedy - I love the death scenes.

Having a sincere desire to want growth does not mean at that point you are committing yourself to growth.

Eugene J. Martin

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.

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.

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

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

You don't have to agree with Trump but the mob can't make me not love him. We are both dragon energy.

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

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

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

Painting is an act, a sequence of movements one bears within oneself, whose source is one's inner being.

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

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organized memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.