Artist Quotes · Page 308

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

— Patti Smith

To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them - in a word, to…

— Gustave Courbet

Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

The thing is, I'll always be a touring artist. It's what I am; that's what I love doing.

— George Ezra

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

— Josef Albers

“Paint what you know, especially if it looks like something you shouldn't know.”

— Andrew Levy

A lot of hip-hop artists wear fur, and they think it's a status symbol. That doesn't register for me; I just see…

— Tommy Lee

The artist has to be exactly the opposite [of people singing the song, I've gotta be Me,] and transcend himself as he…

— Romare Bearden

When we look at a painting, or hear a symphony, or read a book, and feel more Named, then, for us, that…

— Madeleine L'Engle

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the…

— James Whistler

“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The…

— James Baldwin

I don't like to work in an office. I like to work in my house, to be among my own thoughts. The…

— Jack Kirby

I'd really want to - just from my own experience as an artist working with a writer, I'd want to do everything…

— David Finch

“Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar…

— Kurt Vonnegut

I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it…

— Blaise Pascal

“That's initially what got me interested in painting, is that I could create any kind of world that I wanted. No bad…

— Bob Ross

On the 'Blacks & Browns' record, it's me and Sad Boy. He's a Hispanic artist, and we're talking about what we got…

— YG

My growth as an artist and a person has been so slow and gradual, it's hard to make a story out of…

— Juliana Hatfield

The best picture I got was Bianca Jagger whispering in Mick's ear. I caught them telling a secret, which is sort of…

— Robert Mapplethorpe

Sometimes being an artist means knowing when to let someone see something in you that is there that you can't hear or…

— Michael Buble

“...et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature.)”

— Ovid

My uncle is a martial artist, and in the early '80s, he made a kung fu flick with director Charlie Ahearn.

— Michael Che

If I've grown as an artist, it will be represented in the art. There's no need to explain it.

— Matisyahu

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

— Robert Motherwell

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that…

— Vincent Van Gogh

Art made by the people for the people, as a joy to the maker and the user.

— William Morris

In free society art is not a weapon...Artists are not engineers of the soul.

— John F. Kennedy

“A monochrome Jackson Pollock," Jane says, and then tells Tiny, "We gotta bolt. This band is like a root canal sans painkiller".”

— John Green

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

— Pablo Picasso

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

— David Hockney

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.

— George Bernard Shaw

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know…

— Alison Lurie

Art finds a way to be constructive. It becomes heat in cold places; it becomes light in dark places.

— Barbra Streisand

It's a funny semantic turn - when someone paints a landscape, no one says they "borrowed" it, only that they painted it.

— Joe Bradley

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

— Edward Hopper

Comics have a caste system - an editor has to act in a certain way, an artist has to be humble.

— Jack Kirby

“An individual artist needs only a thousand true fans in her tribe. It's enough.”

— Seth Godin

One of the things I find most mysterious in Picasso's work is what I would call the 'unlocation of place.

— Leo Steinberg

The most vigilant self-criticism of course is necessary, but the time comes when the artist must tell himself he is good or…

— Gerald Moor

Museums should be places where you raise questions, not just show stuff.

— William Thorsell