The artist is a receptacle for the 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 (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
There are two men inside the The Artist poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
—Emile Zola (1840–1902) French Novelist
Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness,—whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.
—Emile Zola (1840–1902) French Novelist
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between…this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.
—Federico Fellini (1920–93) Italian Filmmaker
The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don’t suffer, how do we know that we live?
—Sebastian Horsley (1962–2010) English Painters, Author
Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth.
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
This comes from dangling from the ceiling
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.
—Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French Sculptor
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it “creative observation.” Creative viewing.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
—Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) American Painter
Taste! It doesn’t exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.
—Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French Painter, Sculpture, Printer maker, Artist
All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.
—Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American Novelist
In my prints I try to show that we live in a beautiful and orderly world and not in a chaos without norms, as we sometimes seem to. My subjects are also often playful. I cannot help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun deliberately to confuse two and three dimensions, the plane and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase? Can you be definite that it is impossible to eat your cake and have it?
—M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch Graphic Artist
All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superflous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through … You can go into a trance while you’re doing it, so it’s a nice contrast to real life.
—Paul McCartney (b.1942) English Pop Singer, Songwriter
At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being—the reward he seeks—the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–38) American Novelist
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
—James Thurber
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
Great artistic talent in any direction… is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature.
—Carl Sagan (1934–96) American Astronomer
I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired … I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to ‘see’, like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occuring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground.
—Salvador Dali (1904–89) Spanish Painter
My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
—John Lennon (1940–80) British Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist
If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.
—Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) Dutch Painter
The best artist has that thought alone
Which is contained within the marble shell;
The sculptor’s hand can only break the spell
To free the figures slumbering in the stone
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
—Margot Fonteyn (1919–91) English Classical Ballet Dancer
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
—Joseph Campbell (1904–87) American Mythologist, Writer, Lecturer