Quotes About Artistry

our Lord God is an artist like unto none…

Even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

Today there are some worship artists doing well, but when you buy their latest album you don't expect any difference from the previous three. This doesn't seem to do justice to the awesome creative power of almighty God. Serving up the same old, same old is never on the menu for God.

I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don't quite know how to explain it but it's there. These can't be the only notes in the world, there's got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.

The artist who cannot conquer difficulties is not going to be much of a success.

Music is like making love: either all or nothing.

An artist is a conduit for a vision that is as uniquely her own as a fingerprint, and unrecognizable until it appears.

My ambition was to live like music.

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Do not copy me," [Antoine] Bourdelle repeatedly told his students. "Sing your own song.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

THE TAHITIANS don't have a word that means "art." The closest expression in their language translates to something like "I'm doing the best I can." Ever since I heard this it has become a kind of mantra to me. I try and apply it to my own work, to my students and anyone who shares his or her work with me. If we live with the idea of perfection, we will never do anything. The notion paralyzes us, but doing the best we can, this is possible. I

Elizabeth was not playing for the sake of exhibiting her virtuosity: she played for joy.

She knew better: when artistry seems most elusive is when you must focus, dig deep, and force yourself to think about how to give form to an idea that seems too vague to express.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.

The object of art is to give life a shape

Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

artist   A human who notices the ridiculousness of being a human and paints, writes, builds, sculpts, films, acts, plays, sings, cries about it.

When I opened my eyes I saw Tchaikovsky with his baton, seemingly pulling the music right out of the air, as if music was something already in the atmosphere.

I was named after Bob Dylan. Did I ever tell you that?

I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don't care about instrumental prowess. I don't care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I'm a songwriter and I'm familiar with Cage and I couldn't really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn't interest me and I'm astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.