Artist Quotes · Page 267

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— David Hockney

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

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

— Ovid

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

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

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

My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and…

— Burton Silverman

After being taught sets and reps and working at it for a length of time you can't paint by numbers anymore. It…

— Tom Platz

Thinking of that movie 'The Artist'; if anyone ever needed to reach anyone, I'm just thinking they didn't have cell phones, they…

— Edy Ganem

The greatest work of art created first by god and then by man, is the creation of life. The whole process is…

— Bethany Jane Andrews Hoey

I would never have expected anything that I did would ever appear in first-rate museums around the world. That was just a…

— Rick Heinrichs

I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist. And that just…

— Todd Haynes

A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg, is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example…

— Hans Haacke

Every single day, I wake up and take a glimpse of where I am now compared to where I was before, and…

— Mj Rodriguez

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

— Matisyahu

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

— Michael Che

I feel if you hold yourself as an artist first and foremost, the barriers of gender come down.

— Ondi Timoner

No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.

— Marcel Duchamp

Artists get to step outside their comfort zone a 'lil bit and we get some great songs!!

— Matt Squire

In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

— Bridget Riley

When I was a kid, trying not to color outside of the lines was my biggest problem.

— Ritu Ghatourey

You can't reject anything in your life as an artist. Everything has its use.

— Richard Armitage

The artist likes to seem totally responsible for his work. Often he begins to explain it, to make it appear as if…

— Arthur Erickson

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

— Agnes Repplier

You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life

— Woody Allen

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

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

— Leo Steinberg

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

— Seth Godin

Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.

— Oscar Wilde

Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.

— Burton Raffel

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

— William Thorsell

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

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

— Barbra Streisand

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

— Jack Kirby

I've never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn't interest me.

— David Hockney

It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.

— Dave Barry

A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything.

— Val Kilmer