Artist Quotes

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

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

Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent. If I could write, I would write about it. If I could talk, I would talk about it. Since I paint, I must paint about it.

Charles Wilbert White

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

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 paint what you love to hate and what you hate to love.

The Super-City, where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.

Harry Hershfield

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

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.

In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord... all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings.

George Herriman

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

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.

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

George William Russell

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Imogen Cunningham

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.

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.

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

A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.

I like who I am, and am puzzled to find that not everybody shares this opinion.

Ashleigh Brilliant

Everyone has a certain difficulty in growing up, even my children, although I've been a good mother. I'm still not grown up in some ways compared with other people I know.

Angelica Garnett

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.