Quotes About Imagination

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.

A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, "How did I do it?" The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.

I have no sympathy with the belief that art is the restricted province of those who paint, sculpt, make music and verse. I hope we will come to an understanding that the material used is only incidental, that there is artist in every man; and that to him the possibility of development and of expression and the happiness of creation is as much a right and as much a duty to himself, as to any of those who work in the especially ticketed ways.

Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty.

I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul

Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.

The object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.

The picture should only start the observer, should make him think he sees more than is on the canvas. To do this, the painter takes all the factors of the canvas and sets them in motion. He must create a rhythm of movement through all.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation. He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.

It is a creation of your own mind, not the model. The model is dependent on your idea of her. Your canvas should be a thing created under the influence of her.

Pictures tell the story of actual impulse in the artist—or the lack of it.

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it if you wanted to.

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flowsThat liquefaction of her clothes.Next, when I cast mine eyes and seeThat brave vibration each way free;Oh how that glittering taketh me!

THE ROCK OF RUBIES, AND THE QUARRY OF PEARLS Some ask'd me where the Rubies grew: And nothing I did say, But with my finger pointed to The lips of Julia. Some ask'd how Pearls did grow, and where: Then spoke I to my girl, To part her lips, and shew me there The quarrelets of Pearl.

Have ye beheld (with much delight) A red rose peeping through a white? Or else a cherry (double graced) Within a lily? Centre placed? Or ever marked the pretty beam A strawberry shows half drowned in cream? Or seen rich rubies blushing through A pure smooth pearl, and orient too? So like to this, nay all the rest, Is each neat niplet of her breast.

You can make anything out of anything.

Third Doctor: A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.

Joan Maragall