| Quotes on Art & Creativity |
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. |