English Artist Quotes

Having a little fun at my work does not make me any less of an artist and people who appreciate truly beautiful and original creations in pottery are not frightened by innocent tomfoolery!

Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I a non-European relate to European society I find myself living in but do not belong to? How do I react to its assumptions of white superiority?

Rarely if ever does one feel sure one knows enough to go ahead with much of anything new. You bank on faith and courage and the ability to learn on the job.

Cornelia Parker

The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.

Austin Osman Spare

Designers, stay away from corporations that want you to lie for them

Jonathan Barnbrook

They [clouds] come to the dullest and dreariest of scenes like the splendid cortege of an Oriental sovereign who traverses some miserable village.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

It is not a question so much of a 'tree like a figure' or a 'root like a figure' - it is a question of bringing out the anonymous personality of these things.

Graham Sutherland

The upper middle classes like anything ecological: it assuages their guilt. Give your posh friends a bag of muddy parsnips. They'll love it.

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.

On use of elephant dung in controversial pieces such as "Holy Virgin Mary":

It's what people really want from black artists. We're the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer, the magicien de la terre. The exotic, the decorative. I'm giving them all of that, but it's packaged slightly differently.

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

Aubrey Beardsley

I think if she lived in A little shoe-house That little old woman was Surely a mouse!

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

Blue to get ready Green to go Yellow to guide you through the snow Orange to warn you that over you'll go Then red will be the final glow Now seek the black, there's no going back.

Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together.

I find a particular delight in taking the caricature as far as I can. It satisfies me to stretch the human frame about and recreate it and yet keep a likeness.