Quotes About Art

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grows without the thorn

The criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity.

Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.

Al igual que la escritura, la pintura parece reflejar un mundo patas arriba en el que, por así decirlo, la flecha del tiempo discurre en sentido contrario. Las invisibles líneas de la velocidad hacen pensar en un nexo de secuencia y proceso muy diferente. De nuevo ese razonamiento. Siempre me intriga y me desazona, es curioso. Me pregunto si todas las artes son así.

Por ese motivo la minería era un arte y una ciencia, se dijo; porque los mineros morían jóvenes, como los artistas.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.

Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.

When you are drawing, you are always one or two marks ahead. You're always thinking, 'After what I'm doing here I'll go there, and there.' It's like chess or something. In drawing I've always thought economy of means was a great quality - not always in painting, but always in drawing.

Time is his luxury, and he is prepared to spend any amount that is necessary to get a picture right, which is another paradox, since by nature LF is packed with nervous energy and still apt, for example, to dive into traffic and sprint down the road in pursuit of a taxi. 'All my patience', he notes, 'has gone into my work, leaving none for my life.

After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing them. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you that much.

Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between painter and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a picture that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art. …

To understand Michelangelo and his art, it is necessary to accept both these truths. He believed that the sight of beautiful individuals was a path to the divine beauty and goodness of God. Simultaneously, it was a source of hopeless erotic yearning.

Being able to draw well', he goes on, 'is the hardest thing – far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters – Ingres, Degas, just a few.

so often with Michelangelo, the strangeness is inseparable from the power of the work.

I am only interested in art that is in some way concerned with truth. I could not care less whether it is abstract or what form it takes.' …

He never signed anything ever again, because he didn't need to. From this point onwards, it was always obvious whose work this was. It was installed by July 1500 – if not before. The Pietà made his name: he was twenty-five years old.

What, then, is a portrait painter painting? An individual who persists though time, or merely the way a ceaselessly mutating human organism appears in a particular time and place? It is a good question. …

But then, perhaps when we contemplate one of these sculptures we are not really looking at the Pharaoh Sesostris or Senusret but, as LF put it, at humanity. Nearly

But he was an extremely unaesthetic person. When you said that such and such was a beautiful work of art he seemed quite put out. He would say, "What do you mean? Prove it!"' 'Orwell

In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. 'To set' means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. The nature of art would then be this: the truth of being setting itself to work.

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn't just that though, or I've failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.