Quotes About Creativity

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

The more simply you see, the more simply you will render. People see too much, scatteringly.

Be venturesome. Try new things that appeal to you. Examine others. Have a pioneer spirit. Prevent your drawing from being common. Put life into it.

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

Some one has defined a work of art as a "thing beautifully done." I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word "done," and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.

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.

An artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.

We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other. Help the young artists—find for them means to make their financial ways easier, that they may develop and fruit their fullest—but let us not ask them to please us in doing it.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge, each line adds strength and takes none away. Thus a work of art is finished from the beginning, as Whistler has said. If there are only ten lines, then they are the ten lines which comprehend the most. Composition is the freedom of a thing to be its greatest best by being in its right place in the organization. It is a just sense of the relation of things.

There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.

It beats all the things that wealth can give and everything else in the world to say the things one believes, to put them into form, to pass them on to anyone who may care to take them up.

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 TECHNIQUE of a little individuality will be a little technique, however scrupulously elaborated it may be.

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.

Every great artist is a man who has freed himself . . . Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a "universal" without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

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.

If I could see and really understand the essence of the life that is right around me I could with even such technique as I now command make masterpieces.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented.

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.

The effect of brilliancy is to be obtained principally from the oppositions of cool colors with warm colors, and the oppositions of grave colors with bright colors. If all the colors are bright there is no brightness.