Lucian Freud

“What do I ask of a painting?
I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.”

Henri Matisse

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose,
because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.
It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

Andrew Wyeth

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape.
Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

Ansel Adams

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography
all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read,
the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.

Pablo Picasso

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Paul Klee

Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.

Claude Monet

"I've caught this magical landscape and it's the enchantment of it that I'm so keen to render.
Of course lots of people will protest that it's quite unreal, but that's just too bad."

Helen Frankenthaler

There is “no formula." There are no rules.
Let the picture lead you where it must go.

Edgar Allan Poe

"The pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense,
is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful."

Overheard at the Ridgefield Arts Council Artists Networking Event at the Aldrich Museum

If you think of the word EARTH...
without ART, it's just EH.

Giorgio de Chirico

"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits:
logic and common sense will only interfere.
But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams."

Andrew Wyeth

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion
you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

Helen Frankenthaler

“There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”

Albert Einstein

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence

and leading the individual towards freedom.

Jonathan Ive

at Apple's "Celebrating Steve" Event

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff,

he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence.

You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas

ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts,

so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished

Giorgio Morandi

I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates

a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

Willa Cather

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison  for a moment

the shining elusive element which is life itself-

-life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sunlight is painting.

Andrew Wyeth

I don't really have studios. I wander around around people's attics,

out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.

Andrew Wyeth

I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it...

I always want to see the third dimension of something...

I want to come alive with the object.

Nietzsche

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist,

a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication

Margaret J. Wheatley

The things we fear most in organizations --fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances --

are the primary sources of creativity.

Andrew Wyeth

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art.

It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

Emil Zola

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Kasimir Malevich

With the most primitive means the artist creates something

which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

Emil Zola

If you ask mewhat I came to do in this world,I, as an artist,

I will answer you, "I am here to live out loud".

Susan Rothenberg

Sometimes the painting starts to relate very directly to either sights seen or experiences felt, other times it just goes off on a tangent that you really can’t articulate.

Giorgio de Chirico

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits:

logic and common sense will only interfere.

But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of

childhood visions and dreams.

Andrew Wyeth

I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject,

all the texture around it... I always want to see

the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object.

Henry Moore

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living
so there's no end to it.

Ansel Adams

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications,
offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Pablo Picasso

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Diane Arbus

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night

and stealing Oreo cookies.

Simonides 

Greek poet (556 BC - 468 BC)

Painting is silent poetry,

and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Roger Rosenblatt

The best in art and life comes from a center -

something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being.

From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion.

If you begin with a structure,you have to make up the passion,

and that's very hard to do.

Buckminster Fuller

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty.
I only think about how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful,
I know it is wrong.

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love of beauty is Taste.

The creation of beauty is Art.

Paul Cezanne

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone,

and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

Beatrix Potter

Thank goodness I was never sent to school;

it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Jawaharlal Nehru

The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture,

society must set the artist free to follow his vision

wherever it takes him.

Edward Gordon Craig

That is what the title of artist means:

one who perceives more than his fellows,

and who records more than he has seen.

Susan Rothenberg

Sometimes the painting starts to relate very directly to either sights seen
or experiences felt, other times it just goes off on a tangent
that you really can’t articulate.

Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Willa Cather

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment
the shining elusive element which is life itself--
life hurrying past us and running away,
too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Marlene Dumas

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

“You must give birth
to your images.

Fear not the
strangeness you feel.

The future must enter
you...

Long before it
happens.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money;
it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Theodore Adorno

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions
in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised,
in its innermost structure.

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

It is the source of all true art and science.

Eugéne Delacroix

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Paul Gauguin

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color
to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

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.