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
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 to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American Short-Story Writer, Novelist
To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.
—Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French Sculptor
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
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
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
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
My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
—James Thurber
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
This comes from dangling from the ceiling
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
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
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
I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.
—Emile Zola (1840–1902) French Novelist
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 artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
—Novalis (1772–1801) German Romantic Poet, Novelist
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
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
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
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.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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
The monopoly capitalists – even while employing purely empirical methods – weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.
—Che Guevara (1928–67) Argentine-Cuban Revolutionary
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
—James Thurber
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) British Novelist, Playwright, Critic
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
But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
In a certain sense every creative person is a reformer, but this does not mean that he must be in his work a propagandist for good roads, shorter hours, and a low tariff. All these are excellent things, but they need not be the concern of the artist.
—Heywood Hale Broun (1918–2001) American Journalist, Commentator, Actor
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
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
It is my misfortune – and probably my delight – to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! … I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things – so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
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
Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth.
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
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
In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
—John W. Gardner (1912–2002) American Activist
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
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
—Anthony Burgess (1917–93) English Novelist, Critic, Composer
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
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
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
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
Picasso’s mother held great ambitions for him when he was a child. She instructed him: If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as Pope”. Instead,” Picasso quipped, “I became a painter and became a Picasso”.
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
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