Quotes About Artistry

Such command and honesty! Your figures are full of emotion, for instance, here – points at the panel – the figure of Judas on his knees, wringing his hands in self-hatred and pleading for forgiveness… Who would have thought that someone your age, a miller at that, could put so much into a figure!

Trying to force creativity is never good.

An edge of a sword is made as much from the steel taken away as the steel that is left

Indeed, being an artist is not just a job but an identity dependent on a broad range of extracurricular intelligences.

Unlike those in other professions, artists cut the branch they are sitting on.

Any artist should be grateful for a nave grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun

I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.

You think it, I ink it.

being published' is not the same as being a real writer.

to call someone an artist means that they have a sense of higher purpose beyond commerce. Not that they don't profit from their work, or promote themselves, but that the work itself has spiritual, philosophical, emotional or experiential attributes as central goals.

Artists are often victims in a way of their own perceived quality gaps. They struggle to match the ideas in their minds to what they can manifest in the world.

You are not your camera nor is your photography your camera. Nobody who matters cares what camera you use.

I'm speaking of the pursuit of excellence in all things. All things! Presence of mind and devotion to craft. A great artist has these. A great chef. A great master of tea. There's powerful kung fu in a well-built house or an eloquent letter, but the limit of your imagination is bones breaking and bullets flying.

Probably Verrari," muttered the senior, who was methodically torturing a piece of ivory with a slender carving knife. He wanted it to come out like a sculpted terrace he'd seen at the Temple of Iono, alive with lovely relief and fantastical representations of drowned men taken by the Lord of the Grasping Waters. What he seemed to be producing more closely resembled a lump of white dogshit, life-size. "Sooner trust a sailing ship to a blind drunkard with no hands than a Verrari.

Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

Ask any writer or filmmaker or painter just how much of a given project truly represents what he/she envisioned it to be. You'll hear twenty percent...ten...five...few will claim more than thirty. The master of one's medium is the degree to which that percentage can be increased, the degree to which the artist's ideas survive the journey -- or, for some artists, the degree to which the inevitable detours are made useful by the artist.

Comics offers tremendous resources to all writers and artists:faithfulness, control, a chance to be heard far and wide without fear of compromise...it offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word. And all that's needed is the desire to be heard--the will to learn--and the ability to see.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

And here is love like a tinsmith's scoop sunk past its glean in the meal-bin. --"Sunlight

Talent? That's not talent. Talent is Liza Minnelli tap dancing and singing at the same time. What I just saw was devastation. Dying man on the cross. Salvation in B minor.

I always go through different phases of how I write and record. It takes me a long time to kind of conceptualize what feels right.

My advice would be to write -never to stop writing, to keep it up all the time, to be painstaking about it, to write until you begin to write.

Each time I did assignments or editorials, I realized that I wanted to do something more. I saw that it wasn't just about the clothes.