Artist Quotes · Page 394

I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

— Kehinde Wiley

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some…

— Thomas Merton

If thou shouldst paint mountains in a good style and to look natural, take some large stones full of cracks and copy…

— Cennino Cennini

To do art, one thing should always remember - subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.

— Zhang Yimou

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are…

— Salvador Dali

As artists we need to stop making work only for gallery or museum walls, or the coffee tables of collectors.

— Zoe Buckman

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.

— Ben Shahn

I wrote my first rhymes around 8th grade. After serving a year in juvenile detention, I decided to pursue my career as…

— Yukmouth

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be…

— Pablo Picasso

Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more…

— David McCullough

“I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When…

— Lev Grossman

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source…

— Merce Cunningham

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at…

— Ariana Grande

“There are no two things as important to us in life and in art as being threatened and being saved. What are…

— Robert Frost

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do…

— Willem de Kooning

I always did drawings. Then, few years ago, I started working with large-scale paper. It's an extension of performance, because the pieces…

— Rebecca Horn

Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.

— Betty Edwards

In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.

— Herbert Read

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a…

— Bernard Berenson

“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the…

— G.K. Chesterton

Record labels today are much less patient: Artists have a bad record, and they're gone.

— Kenny Chesney

As an artist you have the luxury of maybe presenting an issue in a certain way, as opposed to actually solving it.

— Ezra Koenig

I think it's what art should do: make you feel less alone - either in the quest for truth or in dealing…

— Brendan Gleeson

I think that's the hardest part for an artist is finding their voice and learning how to write, finding what they have…

— Morgan James

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

— Vivienne Westwood

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of…

— Winston Churchill

The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.

— Robin G. Collingwood

What am I afraid of as an artist? I guess I was scared before of just not being heard. But I'm too…

— Sabrina Claudio

“...the state should support art,construed not as amusement but as one of the chief carriers of civilization.”

— Samuel Lipman

Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.

— Paul Keating

I'm supposed to be, I am an artist. Yes, I'm lonely. But I'm married to my loneliness.

— Lady Gaga

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

— Duane Michals

All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms…

— Robertson Davies

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

— Daniel Dennett

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

— William Hazlitt

I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

— Ellsworth Kelly

“They say all art—whether books, music, or visual—is a reaction to other art.”

— Blake Crouch

Artists always try to make something that is going to be relevant and up-to-the-minute.

— Robert Lepage

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or…

— George Bernard Shaw

I feel like being an artist and being an activist are separate things; I know some people who feel very differently.

— Oscar Isaac