Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Artist.
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
James Thurber
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs
Anthony Burgess
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
Pablo Picasso
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
Arnold Bennett
The artist has one function--to affirm and glorify life.
W. Edward Brown
The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization.
Jacob Getlar Smith
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
Charles Horton Cooley, Life and
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
Katherine Anne Porter
The artist simply reveals, he doesn't explain. Freud tried to figure this out because he felt it very important to understand what makes a creative person tick. And he said that he had failed. In other words, I don't think that the artist is a scientist; he's almost the antithesis of the scientist. He cannot explain, he can only state. He makes a poetic statement, and the psychiatrist figures out why that is a universal truth. The psychiatrist tells people why they behave the way they do; the artist tells how they behave.
William Eastlake, interview, 197
We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.
Bob Ross
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you will become a general. If you become a monk, then you will end up as Pope.' Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso.
The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara
In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.
John W. Gardner, The Art of Fict
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
Alan Lightman, Einstein
There's nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! ... I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.
Upton Sinclair
