British Artist Quotes

A wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.

Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.

All the famous people had had an awful time. One of them had a drunken father. Another had a stammer. Another had to wash hundreds of dirty bottles. They had all had what was called a difficult childhood. Clearly you had to have one if you wanted to become famous.

Let's stick together." "Well, you're going to have to wait here for me there: I'm going to the bathroom." "But how long are you going to be?" "Oh, three hours?" "Rocky...

The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes...

Clemence Housman

No one mirrors his age clearer than the artist, for here is the living moment made concrete, the particular made general.

I couldn't do them if I didn't know horses lived behind them.

Charles Keeping

The artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye. I have a habit of looking, and really seeing.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

Nicolas Bentley

Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs.

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

Chris Priestley

Corruption is no stranger to Washington; it is a famous resident.

Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.

Francis Bacon (artist)

I could never bear to be buried with people to whom I had not been introduced.

Norman Parkinson

There are places, just as there are people and objects... whose relationship of parts creates a mystery.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store.

Andy Goldsworthy

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

Frederick Rolfe

After twenty annual visits, I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

To make images is a way of ordering one's world, of exploring and understanding one's relationship to existence.... The images we make are often ahead of our understanding, but to say "yes" to a subject is also to have recognized, however dimly, a part of oneself; to live with that image, to accept its significance is perhaps to grow in understanding.