Ken Done

"Art shouldn't be something that you go quietly into an art gallery and dip your forelock and say 'I have to be very quiet, I'm in here amongst the art.'
It's here, art's everywhere. It's how you use your eyes. It's about the enjoyment of visual things. And it's certainly not for any one group of people."

Robert Rauschenberg

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Grant Wood

I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while
I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.

Nathan Oliveira

You're sitting there with your muse and your muse is telling you something and

you’re following it, and you end up the next day looking at it and thinking
"what the hell was the muse saying to me?"

Claude Monet

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

Vincent van Gogh

The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

Pablo Picasso

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator

between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

Georgia O'Keefe

I find that I have painted my life - things happening in my life - without knowing.

Henri Matisse

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

From D.C. Seitz, Whistler Stories

"I only know of two painters in the world," said a newly introduced feminine enthusiast to Whistler, "yourself and Velasquez."

"Why," answered Whistler in dulcet tones, "why drag in Velasquez?"

Mark Rothko

I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in  expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

Michelangelo

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.