Art Quotes

"The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting." Vincent van Gogh

"I was probably born with the ability to draw, but that does not
make you an artist." James Rosenquist

"There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of
living so there's no end to it." Henry Moore

"I was probably born with the ability to draw, but that does not
make you an artist."
James Rosenquist

"I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there
is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." Vincent van Gogh

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Edward Degas

"Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment."
Claude Monet

"I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract
expressionist, or I'd draw a ram's head, really messy.
I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing
to a guy who did a perfect spiderman."
Jean Michel Basquiat

"Art shouldn't be something that you go quietly into
an art gallery and dip your forelock and say 'I have
to be very quiet, I'm in here amongst the art." Ken Done (Australian painter)

"In the times in which we live it is far too restricting to say that art can only be found in art galleries and
not touch people's everyday lives.. I want to use
any means that are necessary to communicate to
people what I feel about things. There are no rules.
And if there are rules, then you may as well break them." Ken Done

"A Good artist has less time than ideas." Martin Kippenberger

"Never trust an art dealer who'll sit in a room for
more than ten minutes with a crooked picture."
Brett Whiteley

"An artist chooses his subjects... that is the way
he praises." Friedrich Nietzsche

"The only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it immensely. All art is useless."
Oscar Wilde

"Take the attitude of a student, never be too big
to ask questions, never know too much to learn
something new." Og Mandino

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
Oscar Wilde

"No great artist ever sees things as they really
are. If he did he would cease to be an artist." Oscar Wilde

"If I create from the heart, nearly everything
works. If from the head, almost nothing." Marc Chagall

"I hate flowers.. I paint them because they're
cheaper than models and they don't move." Pablo Picasso

"My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive
and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent." Marc Chagall

"A lady friend of mine asked me,
"Well, what do you love most?"
That's how I started painting money." Andy Warhol

"I think we're much smarter than we were.
Everybody knows that abstract art can be art,
and most people know that they may not like
it, even if they understand there's another
purpose to it." Roy Lichtenstein


"There is nothing more difficult for a truly
creative painter than to paint a rose,
because before he can do so he has first
to forget all the roses that were ever
painted." Henri Matisse

"I believe in two things: Following the art and surrendering to that process.

"Brave art is work that makes no apologies for being frankly beautiful.

"Strong paintings have an impeachable cohesiveness of vision. When that happens, there’s a certain trembling aspect of the work that shows it’s high art.

"I was lucky enough to have very excellent teachers. I learned useful techniques early on. Now they’re internalized and I find that simply staying out of the way and following my process encourages confidence in my work.

"One must be transparent to the work. This means being defenseless, groundless and requires working without any safety.

"I paint neither from subject matter nor from intuition, it’s both.

"I am inspired by subject matter but there’s more to it than that. When one sees a scene, one has an experience. The act of painting is reparation for the privilege of having that experience. There is no exclusive disposition of poetic symbol [the history of art] or of pure mark [one’s own unique vision]. Great art is an interplay between the experience of painting and the experience of subject. At one end of the paradigm is objectivity, at the other is poetry. All artists work between these perspectives. I want my paintings to be deeply poetic and painterly experiences for my fellow painters to enjoy. The essence of my process is to make paintings that slowly become beautiful in front of one’s eyes and stay that way forever."– Sam Scott

"For a long time I limited myself to one
color.. as a form of discipline"
Pablo Picasso

"It is only after years of preparation that the
young artist should touch color.. not color
used descriptively, that is, but as a means
of personal expression."
Henri Matisse

"In visual arts, prodigies don't count. In music
and literature, yes, but not in art."
Clement Greenberg

"The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting."
Vincent van Gogh

"The whole world, as we experience it visually,
comes to us through the mystic realm of color."
Hans Hofmann

"A work of art is a world in itself reflecting
senses and emotions of the artist's world."
Hans Hofmann

"You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is.....unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far." Alice Neel

"It's only a guess at the beginning, and then I try to refine it."
Roy Lichtenstein

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and
to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.
It leads to sterility."
Pablo Picasso

"I think about my work every minute of
the day." Jeff Koons

"People say, 'I love your work, it's so detailed.' But that's like saying, 'I love your sweater, it has lots of stitches.'"
Robert Bateman

"Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment." Claude Monet

"Red is one of the strongest colors,
it's blood, it has a power with the eye.
That's why traffic lights are red I
guess, and stop signs as well...
In fact I use red in all of my paintings." Keith Haring

"I think you have to control the
materials to an extent, but it's
important to let the materials
have a kind of power for themselves;
like the natural power of gravity, if
you are painting on a wall, it makes
the paint trickle and it drips; there
is no reason to fight that." Keith Haring

"When a stranger walks up to me and says 'ten years ago we bought a painting of yours. We love it more and more. I don't know which child to leave it to,' then I know that it is all worthwhile." Emily Patrick

"When painting I am walking a tightrope. I might slip off at any moment. Sometimes, when I am brave, I can hop along the rope or even somersault. These are the moments when I paint not from the visual world but from somewhere inside me." Emily Patrick

"Everyone has talent at 25. The
difficulty is to have it at 50." Edgar Degas

"Practice what you know, and it will
help to make clear what now you
do not know." Rembrandt

"A fair price is the highest one a
collector can be induced to pay." Robert Hughes, Art Critic

"Art is long and time is fleeting." Longfellow

"I had reservations about making
art a business, but I got over it." Mary Boone

"I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." Vincent Van Gogh

"A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. Emotion is the starting point, the beginning and the end. Craftsmanship and technoque are in the middle." Paul Czezanne

"Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?" Pablo Picasso

"My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece." Claude Monet

"He (Vincent) has painted a few portraits which have turned out well, but he always does them for no payment. It is a pity that he does not want to earn something, for if he did want to he could make something here, but you can't change a person..." Theo Van Gogh

"When you have the super-rich paying
for an immature Rose Period Picasso
$104m (£57m), close to the GNP of some
Caribbean or African states, something is
very rotten: such gestures do no honour
to art: they debase it by making the desire
for it pathological." Robert Hughes

"Painting gave meaning to my life, which without it, it
would not have had."
Francis Bacon

"I always think I don't do the first one good, so I
try to do it more."
Andy Warhol

"Making Art is a way of reaching out to people in a profound and personal level that reaffirms both the Artist and the viewer's sense of humanity."
Edwin Gardiner

"I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's
been a new kind of honesty in painting where
painters have been very proud of paint and have
let it behave openly."
Robert Rauschenberg

"Nobody but a total masochist wants to be criticized."
Donald Trump

"Some of the pictures are truly mysterious to me...
which is why I so often say publicly that I don’t
know or don’t care what they’re really about." Susan Rothenberg

"There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living
so there's no end to it." Henry Moore

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Pablo Picasso Quotations:

"To finish a picture? What nonsense!"

"My mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

IN LATER LIFE Picasso visited an exhibition of children's drawings. He observed,
"When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

A POOR ARTIST owned a supposed Picasso. He sent it via a friend for the master to authenticate it. Picasso: "It's false."
From a different source the friend brought another and another Picasso-painting. Each time Picasso disowned them. Yet the third time the man said, "But I saw you paint this one with my own eyes."
"I can paint false Picasso as well as anyone," retorted Picasso. Then he bought the first painting for a sum four times as high as the owner had originally hoped it would fetch.

PICASSO was relaxing on a beach in the south of France when he was accosted by a small boy clutching a blank sheet of paper. The child had evidently been dispatched by his parents to solicit an autographed drawing. After a moment's hesitation, Picasso tore up the paper and drew a few designs on the boy's back instead. He signed his name with a flourish and sent the child back to his parents. Relating the incident at a later date, Picasso remarked thoughtfully,
"I wonder if they'll ever wash him again?"

AFTER his so-called Blue Period (1901-04) and Rose (1905-08), Picasso took part in developing Cubism, and later turned to surrealistic figures. His controversial masterpiece is the large painting Guernica (1937). It is valued just as much as Leonardos painting of the careful donna Mona Lisa.
Guernica shows the dreadful destruction of the Basque capital by German bomb planes.

DURING World War II Picasso suffered some harassment from the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Paris. An inquisitive German officer, coming into his apartment, noticed a photograph of Guernica lying on a table. "Did you do that?" he asked Picasso.
"No, you did," said Picasso.

"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."

"The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm."

"The important thing is to create."

"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste.'"