All artists are prepared to suffer for their work, but why are so few prepared to learn to draw?
Banksy
I am convinced that the works of today’s avant-garde are the poisoned fruit of a spiritual decadence, with all the consequences that arise from a tragic loss of love for life.
Pietro Annigoni
Impulse alone does not make a work of art.
Pietro Annigoni
The emotional states which a painter or other artist feels irresistibly forced to express are those most intimate states of mind and soul from which may be struck the spark or revelation, kindling a light that shows things in their deepest, most universal, and perhaps even eternal reality; this light we may call the light of poetry.
Pietro Annigoni
Life is the greatest teacher.
Pietro Annigoni
It is as if an artist had within himself a kind of refinery in which to process the raw material of his life, the personal and public experiences, memories, aspirations, everyday work, dreams, doubts, the disappointments and excitements of his pilgrimage through the chaotic labyrinth of the world, and that in doing so, he aims to find himself, to discover the outlines of his own being, to take that heap of desperate, elusive and often contradictory sensations, and forge them into a transcendent meaning.
Pietro Annigoni
Let each man exercise the art he knows.
Aristophanes
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.
Aristotle
What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.
Georg Baselitz
All artists are vain, they long to be recognised and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
Francis Bacon
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.
Francis Bacon
You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.
Francis Bacon
All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.
Francis Bacon
Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don’t work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar… you never know.
Francis Bacon
I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence… as a snail leaves its slime.
Francis Bacon
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness.
Francis Bacon
Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.
Francis Bacon
The feeling of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
Francis Bacon
A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.
Francis Bacon
I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do
Francis Bacon
Art is creative for the sake of realisation, not for amusement… for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
Max Beckmann
What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible.
Max Beckmann
If the canvas is filled only with a two-dimensional conception of space, we shall have applied art, or ornament. Certainly this may give us pleasure, though I myself find it boring as it does not give me enough visual sensation. To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking ….
Max Beckmann
Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable expression of eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object.
Max Beckmann
I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
Max Beckmann
One of my problems is to find the ego, which has only one form, and is immortal - to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live ….
Max Beckmann
The uniform application of a principle of form is what rules me in the imaginative alteration of an object. One thing is sure - we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas.
Max Beckmann
Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.
Max Beckmann
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
Bernard Berenson
We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
Bernard Berenson
When nations grow old, the arts grow cold and commerce settles on every tree.
William Blake
The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel’d to heaven is no artist.
William Blake
The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
William Blake
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare…my business is to create.
William Blake
Invention depends altogether, upon execution or organisation; as that is right or wrong so is the invention perfect or imperfect. Whoever is set to undermine the execution of art is set to destroy art. Michael Angelo’s art depends on Michael Angelo’s execution altogether.
William Blake
Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form or outline. On where that is put; where that is wrong, the colour can never be right; and it is always wrong in Titian and Correggio, Rubens and Rembrandt.
William Blake
I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.
William Blake
The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: The bad artist seems to copy a great deal. The good one really does copy a great deal.
William Blake
It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting.
Pierre Bonnard
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
Alain de Botton
To be pure imitation, painting must forget appearance.
Georges Braque
To work from nature is to improvise.
Georges Braque
One must be aware of a formula good for everything , that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylisation.
Georges Braque
The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.
Georges Braque
In art, progress does not consist in extension, but in knowledge of limits.
Georges Braque
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.
Georges Braque
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
Georges Braque
One does not imitate appearances; the appearance is the result.
Georges Braque
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.
Georges Braque
One must not imitate what one wants to create.
Georges Braque
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
Georges Braque
Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.
Constantin Brancusi
To see far is one thing, going there is another.
Constantin Brancusi
Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.
Constantin Brancusi
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
Albert Camus
To copy well is to choose to enter an exceptional mind.
Jeffery Camp
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere, his sincerity in itself is religion.
Emily Carr
I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
Emily Carr
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul.
Emily Carr
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.
Emily Carr
You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That’s all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.
Emily Carr
All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one’s private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.
Paul Cezanne
Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.
Paul Cezanne
Don’t be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.
Paul Cezanne
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
Paul Cezanne
It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.
Paul Cezanne
Painting is damned difficult - you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.
Paul Cezanne
Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, little by little modify our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us….
Paul Cezanne
Shall I ever reach the goal so eagerly sought and so long pursued? I hope so, but as long as it has not been attained a vague feeling of discomfort persists which will not disappear until I shall have gained the harbour - that is, until I shall have accomplished something more promising than what has gone before, thereby verifying my theories, which in themselves, are easy to put forth.
Paul Cezanne
May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.
Paul Cezanne
There is a logic of colours, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.
Paul Cezanne
It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.
Paul Cezanne
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Marc Chagall
Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeeding.
Mark Chagall
In painting, the images of a woman or of a cow have different values of plasticity - but not different poetic values.
Mark Chagall
I am against the terms ‘fantasy’ and ’symbolism’ in themselves. All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical, ‘fantasy’, fairy tale or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.
Mark Chagall
For me a picture is a plane surface covered with representations of objects - beasts, birds, or humans - in a certain order in which anecdotal illustrational logic has no importance. The visual effectiveness of the painted composition comes first. Every extra-structural consideration is secondary.
Mark Chagall
In our life there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love.
Marc Chagall
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G K Chesterton
There is nothing new in art except talent.
Anton Chekov
As a general rule, one should never touch an oil painting unless it is quite wet or quite dry. Unless very exceptional effects are required, there is nothing more fatal than to work at a picture when it is sticky.
The Hon John Collier
Painting justifies itself. Rather than pathetically struggling to keep up with the new freak-show culture of videos and installations, painting will only be worth having if it reconnects with its own inner life, where the old and the new are the same.
Matthew Collings
Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Jean Cocteau
I think it is never worth while to work from models who are positively ugly. It is a dangerous thing to the artist to get used to ugliness in any form.
The Hon John Collier
Painting is a science of which pictures are but the experiments.
John Constable
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.
John Constable
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
John Constable
The deterioration of art has everywhere proceeded from similar causes, the imitation of preceding styles, with little reference to nature. In Italy [in the eighteenth century] the taste was for the beautiful, but the beautiful in the hands of the mannerists became insipid, and from that descended to the unmeaning.
John Constable
I am here on behalf of my own profession, and I trust it is with no intrusive spirit that I now stand before you; but I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information on painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that is scientific as well a poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can , produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities; and to show by tracing the connecting link in the history of landscape painting that no great painter was ever self-taught.
John Constable
Art or talent, for an artist, is merely a means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the things of the period in which he lives.
Gustave Courbet
Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
Gustave Courbet
The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it. Once the beautiful is real and visible it contains its artistic expression. He trifles with it at the risk of denaturing, and so weakening, it. Beauty as given by nature is superior to all the conventions of the artist.
Gustave Courbet
To know in order to do: such has been my thought. To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them - in a word, to create a living art - this has been my aim.
Gustave Courbet
I cannot teach my art, nor the art of any school, since I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is but the result of his own inspiration and his own study of past tradition. I add that, in my opinion, art or talent, for an artist, is merely a means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the things of the period in which he lives.
Gustave Courbet
I, who believe that every artist must be his own master, cannot think of becoming a teacher.
Gustave Courbet
I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art’s sake. No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality.
Gustave Courbet
Imagination in art consists in finding the most complete expression for an existing thing, but never in imagining or creating this object itself.
Gustave Courbet
Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
Gustave Courbet
The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
Gustave Courbet
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
Salvador Dali
Have no fear of perfection - you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dali
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
Salvador Dali
God is just another artist, like me.
Salvador Dali
The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments.
Salvador Dali
If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes.
Jacques-Louis David
Rarely does one do good things to order, at least that has always been the effect that this way of working has had on me. This procedure was only good for second-rate painters. It is what caused Raphael and so many other first-raters to commit anachronisms they never should have allowed themselves, such as introducing modern popes into scenes depicting much earlier events.
Jacques-Louis David
In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.
Jacques-Louis David
To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.
Jacques-Louis David
The arts must therefore contribute forcefully to the education of the public. Too long have tyrants, fearful even of the image of virtue, kept thought itself in chains, encouraged license, and stamped out genius; the arts are the imitation of nature in her most beautiful and perfect form; a feeling natural to man attracts him to the same end….
Jacques-Louis David
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 regions of childhood vision and dreams.
Giorgio De Chirico
A painting is an artificial work existing outside nature and it requires as much cunning as the perpetration of a crime.
Edgar Degas
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50.
Edgar Degas
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves in it nothing.
Eugene Delacroix
We work not only to produce but to give value to time.
Eugene Delacroix
What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Eugene Delacroix
The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
Eugene Delacroix
All painting worthy of the name, unless one is talking about black-and-white, must include the idea of colour as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro and proportion and perspective. Proportion applies to sculpture as to painting; perspective determines the contour; chiaroscuro gives relief through the disposition of lights and shadows in their relationship with the background; colour gives the appearance of life, etc.
Eugene Delacroix
God is that inner presence which makes us admire the beautiful and consoles us for not sharing the happiness of the wicked.
Eugene Delacroix
The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.
Eugene Delacroix
I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is to say, the material thing called painting - was no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator. Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.
Eugene Delacroix
What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Eugene Delacroix
Seeing is in itself a movement.
Robert Delaunay
All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.
Otto Dix
What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.
Jean Dubuffet
The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.
Marcel Duchamp
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.
Albrecht Dürer
No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty.
Albrecht Dürer
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
T S Eliot
Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is naturally difficult to assess one’s place in the period one lives in - perhaps it is impossible.
Jacob Epstein
My outstanding merit in my own eyes is that I believe myself to be a return in sculpture to the human outlook, without in any way sinking back into the flabby sentimentalising, or the merely decorative, that went before.
Jacob Epstein
As I see sculpture, it must not be rigid. It must quiver with life, while carving often leads a man to neglect the flow and rhythm of life.
Jacob Epstein
Works of art are not created by feeling, thus feeling does not suffice for understanding them.
Konrad Fiedler
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert
Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.
Henry Fuseli
Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.
Henry Fuseli
Taste is the legitimate offspring of nature, educated by propriety: fashion is the bastard of vanity, dressed by art.
Henry Fuseli
Painting and punctuality mix like oil and vinegar.
Thomas Gainsborough
Civilisation begins with sculpture and ends with it
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
A critic at my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My Drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets. The public man - the private man.
Paul Gauguin
Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool and turn boiling blood into stone. Though it were a ruby, fling it far from you.
Paul Gauguin
Seek for harmony and not contrasts, for what accords, not for what clashes. It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable colour to every object; beware of this stumbling-block.
Paul Gauguin
Go from dark to light, from light to dark. The eye seeks to refresh itself through your work; give it food for enjoyment, not dejection. It is only the sign-painter who should copy the works of others. If you reproduce what another has done you are nothing but a maker of patchwork; you blunt your sensibility and immobilise your colouring. Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.
Paul Gauguin
It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting. It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own; your sensation, your intelligence, and your soul will triumph over the eye of the amateur. When you want to count the hairs on a donkey, discover how many he has on each ear and determine the place of each, you go to the stable.
Paul Gauguin
With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.
Theodore Gericault
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Alberto Giacometti
There is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
Ernst Gombrich
It took some time before the public learned that to appreciate an Impressionist painting one has to step back a few yards, and enjoy the miracle of seeing these puzzling patches suddenly fall into one place and come to life before our eyes.
Ernst Gombrich
One cannot explain the existence of genius. It is better to enjoy it.
Ernst Gombrich
The painter must leave the beholder something to guess.
Ernst Gombrich
If you ask me what the world looks like to me, it looks like a painting by Pissarro.
Ernst Gombrich
The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art.
Ernst Gombrich
A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.
Edmond Jules Goncourt
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco de Goya
Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.
Benjamin Robert Haydon
Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.
Benjamin Robert Haydon
A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts.
Ernest Hemingway
Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.
William Ernest Henley
At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn’t enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It’s not competitive with men. It’s a complementary contribution.
Barbara Hepworth
I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you’re professional or you’re not.
Barbara Hepworth
I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.
Barbara Hepworth
My works are an imitation of my own past and present.
Barbara Hepworth
The fact that a plastic projection of thought can only live by its inner power and not by physical content, means that the range for its choice of form is free and unlimited.
Barbara Hepworth
One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.
Barbara Hepworth
Body experience… is the centre of creation.
Barbara Hepworth
Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again… Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.
Barbara Hepworth
I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
Barbara Hepworth
The serpentine line, or line of grace, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety.
William Hogarth
All great art is modern when it is produced
Henry Holiday
No art is genuine which is not modern in the sense of expressing the best of which the artist and his age are capable
Henry Holiday
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
Edward Hopper
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
Edward Hopper
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
Aldous Huxley
There is no such thing as ‘accurate drawing’. There is beautiful drawing, and ugly, and nothing else.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil. As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modelling. See what remains after that. Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
The more sublime efforts of art have no effect at all upon uncultivated minds. Fine and delicate taste is the fruit of education and experience. All that we receive at birth is the faculty for creating such taste in ourselves and for cultivating it, just as we are born with a disposition for receiving the laws of society and for conforming to their usages. It is up to this point, and no further, that one may say the taste is natural to us.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Look: who is there, among the great men, who has not imitated? Nothing is made of nothing, and the way good inventions are made is to familiarise yourself with those of others.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Expression in painting demands a very great science of drawing; for expression cannot be good if it has not been formulated with absolute exactitude. To seize it only approximately is to miss it and to represent only those false people whose study it is to counterfeit sentiments which they do not experience. The extreme precision we need is to be arrived at only through the surest talent for drawing. Thus the painters of expression, among the moderns, turn out to be the greatest draftsmen. Look at Raphael!
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
There are not two arts, there is only one: it is the one which has as its foundation the beautiful, which is eternal and natural. Those who seek elsewhere deceive themselves, and in the most fatal manner.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.
Frida Kahlo
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Wassily Kandinsky
There is no must in art because art is free.
Wassily Kandinsky
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
There are some people who don’t like museums because they think of them as tombs, or something negative. I’ve always loved them. They are to me lighthouses of utopianism and social well-being.
R B Kitaj
When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
Paul Klee
Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me forever… Colour and I are one. I am a painter.
Paul Klee
Genius is the error in the system.
Paul Klee
It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive.
Paul Klee
The domination of life is one of the basic conditions of productive expression.
Paul Klee
We construct and construct, and yet intuition still has its uses. Without it we can do a lot, but not everything. One may work for a long time, do different things, many things, important things, but not everything.
Paul Klee
I have to disappoint at first. I am expected to do things a clever fellow could easily fake. But my consolation must be that I am much more handicapped by the sincerity of my intentions than by any lack of talent or ability. I have a feeling that sooner or later I shall arrive at something legitimate, only I must begin, not with hypothesis, but with specific instances, no matter how minute.
Paul Klee
But by way of consolation: it is valueless to paint premature things, what counts is to be a personality, or at least to become one.
Paul Klee
One eye sees, the other feels.
Paul Klee
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Paul Klee
The essential of painting is that something, that ‘ethereal glue,’ that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.
Yves Klein
A person is not a still life – not even a dead person.
Oskar Kokoshka
I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams.
Oskar Kokoshka
I want to cultivate the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.
Käthe Kollwitz
Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius – and I count myself among these – have to restore the lost connection once more.
Käthe Kollwitz
The artist is nothing more nor less than an observer and he is the greater or lesser artist according to the perfection or imperfection of this power of observation.
Édouard Lantéri
Above all, it is a matter of loving art, not understanding it.
Fernand Leger
I think we’re much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.
Roy Lichtenstein
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln
I’ll always be grateful to rent collecting. I’ve put many of the tenants in my pictures.
L S Lowry
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
Rene Magritte
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
Rene Magritte
Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.
Rene Magritte
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.
Andre Malraux
All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
Andre Malraux
There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When you haven’t, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.
Edouard Manet
You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real.
Edouard Manet
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
Yann Martel
A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.
Henri Matisse
Time extracts various values from a painter’s work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
Henri Matisse
An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.
Henri Matisse
What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness.
Henri Matisse
My choice of colours does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience.
Henri Matisse
I cannot copy nature in a servile way, I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture - when I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of musical composition.
Henri Matisse
The chief aim of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my colours without a preconceived plan. If at the first step and perhaps without my being conscious of it one tone has particularly pleased me, more often than not when the picture is finished I will notice that I have respected this tone while I have progressively altered and transformed the others. I discover the quality of colours in a purely instinctive way.
Henri Matisse
Expression, to my way of thinking, does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions - everything plays a part.
Henri Matisse
For me, all is in the conception. I must have a clear vision of the whole composition from the very beginning.
Henri Matisse
It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.
Henri Matisse
A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
Henri Matisse
In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome.
Henri Matisse
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.
Henri Matisse
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
Andre Maurois
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Marshall McLuhan
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
H L Mencken
Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.
Michelangelo
….that what one must toil and labour with hard work and study to attain in a painting is that, after much labour spent on it, it should seem to have been done almost rapidly and with no labour at all, although in fact it was not so. And this needs most excellent skill and art.
Michelangelo
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
Michaelangelo
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
Michelangelo
There are many who maintain a thousand lies, and one is that eminent painters are strange, harsh, and unbearable in their manner, although they are really human and humane. And these fools, and not sensible persons, consider them fantastic and capricious and are loath to tolerate such characteristics in a painter.
Michelangelo
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
In my opinion, painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.
Michelangelo
Genius is eternal patience.
Michelangelo
The mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by the endeavour to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something divine.
Michelangelo
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo
I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.
Joan Miro
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
Joan Miro
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian
Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
Claude Monet
It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
Claude Monet
Pictures aren’t made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red … But peppermint or Chocolate, they are still confections.
Claude Monet
I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly … If their painting does not improve by itself, it means nothing can be done - and I wouldn’t do anything!
Claude Monet
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition. Techniques vary, art stays the same: it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.
Claude Monet
Art can have a considerable influence on our own response to nature. It can enhance our vision, so that we become aware of a new and deeper meaning in what we see around us.
Sir Thomas Monnington
There are universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.
Henry Moore
There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.
Henry Moore
To be an artist is to believe in life.
Henry Moore
A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.
Giorgio Morandi
It is important to express oneself… provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.
Berthe Morisot
I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.
William Morris
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye…. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
Edvard Munch
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.
Modest Mussorgsky
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.
John Nash
‘Painting’ and ‘religious experience’ are the same thing.
Ben Nicholson
We have art to save ourselves from the truth
Friedrich Nietzsche
No artist tolerates reality.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is more godlike than science. Science discovers; art creates.
John Opie
Art is the lie that makes us realise the truth.
Pablo Picasso
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after one grows up.
Pablo Picasso
Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
Pablo Picasso
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
I have a feeling that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco and the rest, as well as all the modern painters, the good and the bad, the abstract and the non-abstract, are all standing behind me watching me at work.
Pablo Picasso
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Pablo Picasso
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
Pablo Picasso
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso
One cannot go against nature…. We may allow ourselves certain liberties, but only in details.
Pablo Picasso
Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it. Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realised, it is there to live its own life.
Pablo Picasso
Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture - then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from on place turns up somewhere else.
Pablo Picasso
The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting … When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future.
Pablo Picasso
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in his work
Pablo Picasso
An artist lies to reach another kind of truth.
Pablo Picasso
A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.
Pablo Picasso
When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.
Pablo Picasso
I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.
Pablo Picasso
The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made the attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.
Pablo Picasso
My mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general; if you become a monk, you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
If only they would realise above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
Pablo Picasso
And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic point of view of life.
Pablo Picasso
Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.
Pablo Picasso
They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
Pablo Picasso
As soon as it is bought and hung on a wall, it takes on quite a different kind of significance, and the painting is done for.
Pablo Picasso
Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression
Pablo Picasso
There are some curious men who form an idea of a master, by the sight of three or four of his pictures; and who, after this, believe they have a sufficient authority to decide what his manner is; without considering what care the painter took about them, and what age he was of when he drew them. ….. There is none also that had not his beginning, his progress, and his end; that is to say, three manners.
Roger de Piles
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Camille Pissarro
God takes care of imbeciles, little children and artists.
Camille Pissarro
Sometimes I am horribly afraid to turn round canvases which I have piled against the wall; I am constantly afraid of finding monsters where I believed there were precious gems!
Camille Pissarro
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
Camille Pissarro
Good art seems ancient to its contemporaries, and modern - to their descendants.
Plutarch
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem irreconcilable and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
Katherine Anne Porter
There is no faking in the arts. No artist can present what he hasn’t got.
Ezra Pound
Painting is nothing but an imitation of human actions, which alone are, properly speaking, imitable. Other actions are imitable not per se, but accidentally, and not as principal but as accessory parts. With this qualification one may also imitate not only the actions of beasts, but anything natural.
Nicolas Poussin
Colours in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of metre is in poetry.
Nicolas Poussin
Art is not a different thing from nature, nor can it pass beyond nature’s boundaries. For that light of knowledge which by natural gift is scattered here and there and appears in different men in different times and places is collected into one body by art. This light is never to be found in its entirety or even in a large part in a single man.
Nicolas Poussin
A painting will be elegant when the extreme distances are connected to the foregrounds by means of the middle distances in such a way that they will contrast neither too feebly nor with too much harshness of lines and colours. Here one may speak of the friendships and emnities of colours and their rules.
Nicolas Poussin
Novelty in painting consists mainly not in a subject never treated before, but in good and new groupings and expressions. By these means a subject that is common and old can become singular and new.
Nicolas Poussin
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
Marcel Proust
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man’s nature.
Ayn Rand
Every good painter paints what he is.
Rembrandt
Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.
Rembrandt
Practise what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.
Rembrandt
In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
I’ve known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
I’ve been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(About 1883) I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor how to draw. In a word, Impressionism was a blind alley, as far as I was concerned.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Be a good craftsman; it won’t stop you being a genius.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Style in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
The painter of genius will not waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
An artist’s failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he confirms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.
Bridget Riley
To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life.
Diego Rivera
I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.
Diego Rivera
I choose a block of marble and chop off everything I don’t need.
François-Auguste Rodin
He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist.
François-Auguste Rodin
To tell the truth, Michelangelo does not, as it is often contended, hold a unique place in art. He is the culmination of all Gothic thought ….
François-Auguste Rodin
The sculptor represents the transition from one pose to another. He indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be.
François-Auguste Rodin
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.
François-Auguste Rodin
As paradoxical as it may seem, a great sculptor is as much a colourist as the best painter, or, rather, the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one so much as the most charming etchings.
François-Auguste Rodin
To sum it up, the greatest genius of modern times has celebrated the epic of shadow, while the ancients celebrated that of light. And if we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo, as we did that of the Greeks, we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy, the will to act without the hope of success - in fine, the martyrdom of the creature tormented by unrealisable aspirations ….
François-Auguste Rodin
Genius only comes to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.
François-Auguste Rodin
One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience.
François-Auguste Rodin
In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.
François-Auguste Rodin
Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, is what makes the difference in all art.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Mark Rothko
I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.
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.
A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.
Mark Rothko
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
John Ruskin
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts; the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three the only quite trustworthy one is the last
John Ruskin
No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
John Ruskin
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
John Ruskin
Whether you are drawing a piece of Greek armour, or a hawk’s beak, or a lion’s paw, you will find that the mere necessity of using the hand compels attention to circumstances which would otherwise have escaped notice, and fastens them in the memory without farther effort.
John Ruskin
Man is not a camera. The object of painting is not to copy but to express one’s delight in the colours, shapes, forms and relationships of the objects of one’s contemplation.
Adrian Ryan
The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.
Albert Pinkham Ryder
If you study a great work of art, you’ll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me.
Charles Saatchi
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
George Sand
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
John Singer Sargent
Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.
Egon Schiele
We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.
Arthur Schopenhauer
In the absence of organised religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art – not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.
Roger Scruton
Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.
Georges Seurat
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard Shaw
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
George Bernard Shaw
I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
George Bernard Shaw
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
George Bernard Shaw
And though the artist must remain master of his craft, the surface, at times raised to the highest pitch of liveliness, should transmit to the beholder the sensation which possessed the artist.
Alfred Sisley
Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has worked through, and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
Leo Tolstoy
In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
Lionel Trilling
If I could find anything blacker than black, I’d use it.
J M W Turner
I’m painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I’m trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.
Euan Uglow
Giacometti always wanted to look into the eyes of the models, but I don’t want the scrutiny of the model on me whilst I’m working, so you will very rarely find the eyes are looking at me.
Euan Uglow
Art is a deliberate recreation of a new and special reality that grows from your response to life. It cannot be copied; it must be created.
Unknown
Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.
Unknown
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Paul Valéry
And in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, and which we seek to give by the actual radiance and vibration of our colourings
Vincent Van Gogh
Just because of Rubens, I am looking for a blonde model.
Vincent Van Gogh
Taking if you like the time in which we live as a great and true renaissance of art, the worm-eaten official tradition still alive but really impotent and inactive, the new painters alone, poor, treated like madmen and because of this treatment actually becoming so at least as far as their social life is concerned.
Vincent Van Gogh
So I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round and round to make a living; and second, the study of colour. I am always in the hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colours, their mingling and their opposition. To express the thought of brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background.
Vincent Van Gogh
Why does one not hold to what one has, like the doctors and the engineers; once a thing is discovered and invented they retain the knowledge; in these wretched Fine Arts everything is forgotten, nothing is kept.
Vincent Van Gogh
Because, instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, so as to express myself forcibly.
Vincent Van Gogh
It is not emotion, the sincerity of one’s feeling for nature, that draws us, and if emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a sequence and a coherence like words in a speech or a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in the time to come there will again be heavy days, empty of inspiration.
Vincent Van Gogh
I don’t know if I can convey the postman as I feel him… Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.
Vincent Van Gogh
An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
Vincent Van Gogh
The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in Congress.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.
Edward Varese
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci
He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.
Leonardo da Vinci
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind. Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.
Leonardo da Vinci
The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body may not sap the vigour of the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci
The painter who draws by practise and judgement of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror that reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same.
Leonardo da Vinci
When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object presented by nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror.
Leonardo da Vinci
If the painter wishes to see enchanting beauties, he has the power to produce them. If he wishes to see monstrosities, whether terrifying, or ludicrous and laughable, or pitiful, he has the power and the authority to create them. If he wishes to produce towns or deserts, if in the cold season warm places, he can make them. If he wants valleys, if from high mountaintops he wants to survey vast stretches of country, if beyond he wants to see the horizon on the sea, he has the power to create all this; and likewise, if from deep valleys he wants to see high mountains of from high mountains deep valleys….
Leonardo da Vinci
I do not find any other difference between painting and sculpture than the sculptor’s work entails greater physical effort and the painter’s greater mental effort.
Leonardo da Vinci
Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry….
Leonardo da Vinci
O painter, take care lest the greed for grain prove stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than is the renown of riches.
Leonardo da Vinci
The youth first ought to learn perspective, then the proportions of everything, then he should learn from the hand of a good master in order to accustom himself to good limbs; then from nature in order to confirm for himself the reasons for what he has learned; then for a time he should study the works of different masters; then make it a habit to practise and work at his art.
Leonardo da Vinci
A good painter is to paint two main things, namely, man and the working of man’s mind. The first is easy, the second difficult, for it is to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.
Leonardo da Vinci
Surely when a man is painting a picture he ought not to refuse to hear any man’s opinion, for we know very well that though a man may not be a painter he may have a true conception of the form of another man, and can judge aright whether he is humpbacked or has one shoulder high or low, or whether he has a large mouth or nose or other defects.
Leonardo da Vinci
How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.
Leonardo da Vinci
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
Leonardo da Vinci
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
Leonardo da Vinci
The art of creation is older than the art of killing.
Andrei Voznesensky
Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.
Andy Warhol
An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have, but that he – for some reason – thinks would be a good idea to give them.
Andy Warhol
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Simone Weil
The artist must create something of rather less worth than the philosopher, for he is more dependent on the moment than the latter.
Otto Weininger
An artist is not paid for his labour but for his vision.
James Whistler
It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.
James Whistler
A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.
James Whistler
To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.
James Whistler
The work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow - suggests no effort - and is finished from its beginning.
James Whistler
Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong; that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.
James Whistler
The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only a tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not his model.
James Whistler
Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful - as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.
James Whistler
The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.
James Whistler
Art happens - no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.
James Whistler
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour.
James Whistler
Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies’.
James Whistler
Art is the thrilling spark that beats death – that’s all.
Brett Whiteley
I was in a life drawing class taught by Henry Moore. He saw me using a rubber and snatched it out of my hand and threw it out of the window. I’ve never used a rubber since.
Gerald Wilde
All bad art is the result of good intentions.
Oscar Wilde
One can exist without art, but one cannot live without it,
Oscar Wilde
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Oscar Wilde
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.
Oscar Wilde
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
Oscar Wilde
It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.
Oscar Wilde
Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde
There are two ways of disliking art. One is to dislike it. The other is to like it rationally.
Oscar Wilde
It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.
George E Woodberry
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Emile Zola
