Art Quote by Lawren Harris

“The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form…” quote by Lawren Harris — Download Open image

“The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions.”

Lawren Harris

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More by Lawren Harris

Art is the distillate of life, the winnowed result of the experience of a people, the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world; a world in which all ideas, thoughts, and forms are pure and beautiful and completely clear, the world Plato held to be perfect and eternal. All works that have…

Lawren Harris

Are we taking the drunken drivers off the road only to turn them into drunken pedestrians?

Lawren Harris

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The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

Lawren Harris

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So long as painting deals with objective nature, it is an impure art, for recognizability precludes the highest aesthetic emotion. All painting, ancient or…

Lawren Harris

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Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life.

Lawren Harris

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Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative…

Lawren Harris

If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay…

Lawren Harris

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Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye - finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to…

Lawren Harris

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Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always…

Lawren Harris

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The thought of today cannot be expressed in the language of yesterday.

Lawren Harris

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For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can.

Lawren Harris

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Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure.

Lawren Harris

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Explore all 34 Lawren Harris quotes

More Art quotes

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

Benjamin Franklin

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus

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I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

Aaron Rose

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The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Erich Fromm

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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

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“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

Justina Chen Headley