Quotes About Artist

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

An artist has to stick true to their own beliefs and be a pioneer. They're not necessarily pleasing a studio or a government or anybody else but just being honest and raw and expressing themselves in a beautiful way. That's not always what people want to hear or expect to see.

Recognizing the artist Joseph Cornell's genius for recycling, he inscribed a book to him as the Benvenuto Cellini of Flotsam and Jetsam

Do you know how to tell if a work is art?" he asked her calmly. "True art changes the artist. The artist puts something into the work and he changes. That's how you tell.

If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.

Martha Graham, speaking to dancers, could have been speaking to any artist, any writer: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist.

That, my dear uncultured wolf, is a Charlie Russell—cowboy turned artist. Without him, Montana's history would just be a footnote in a Zane Grey novel.

because Imre offered what every artist needs most—an appreciative, affluent audience.

silence, simplicity and humility . . . the only proper state for the artist as for the human being

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revalation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Nothing seemed more romantic to my young mind. I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.

Sentivo di essermi trasformata, toccata dalla rivelazione che l'arte è creata dagli esseri umani, che essere un artista voleva dire vedere ciò che gli altri non potevano vedere. Non avevo prove di possedere la stoffa dell'artista, ma bramavo esserlo con tutta me stessa [...] Mi domandai se meritavo davvero di essere un'artista; non mi preoccupavo delle sofferenze che una vocazione avrebbe comportato, m avevo il terrore di non ricevere la chiamata.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one. I imagined that I felt the calling and prayed that it be so.

I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers. I'd brag that I was going to be an artist's mistress one day. Nothing seemed more romantic to my young mind. I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.

And he wanted more than anything else, deeply and compassionately, to be of help; and he could be of help in this age, and was of help, because artist and philosopher as well as theologian, he cared for culture as well as for Christ.6

I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).