Artist Quote by Philip Guston

Artists create out of a sense of desolation. The spirit of creation is a excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul.

— El Greco

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

— Lucian Freud

My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.

— Jose Parla

Painting is a form of incarnation. It is spirit made manifest in the world.

— Jeffrey Smart

I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.

— Robert Irwin

I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment…

— May Sarton

I feel that when I am painting, it is a form of worship. I see how wonderful nature is and how wonderful art is...…

— E. J. Hughes

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

— Max Ernst

The strong experience of nature... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future…

— Paul Cezanne

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

— Anonymous

The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human…

— Keith Haring

It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order…

— Ernst Ludwig Kirchner