Quotes About Art

Vanessa insisted that film was exactly like poetry. Nothing necessarily had to happen; you just had to feel something.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.

Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity.

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. 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.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

Surely all art is the result of having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. RAINER MARIA RILKE

It's only a book. But what it means to write a book.

If there were not anxiety behind those apples, Cézanne would not interest me any more than Bouguereau.

I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world.

God killed my little sister. That's right, Lev. A little girl, suddenly sick and dead. Everything He touches is destroyed. Casagemas, Apollinaire, Eva, Max Jacob. How do you worship Him, Lev? He's the true destroyer. Satan works out in the open, cards on the table. He gives it to you straight, no games. God plays at sweetness and goodness, and kills you. Who's worse, Satan or God? Satan at least has the decency to show us his real face. So I pay God back with my paintings.

I...thought the street was crying and wondered how I could paint the street crying. I thought I had said something like that to myself before, but I could not remember when or where it might have been. The street is crying, I thought, and I'm sitting here. It's my street and I can't draw it. I want to paint it, I have to paint it while it's crying, and why am I sitting here?

It intrigued me that I had made no drawings of my father. The mashpia would notice that. But why had I made no drawings of my father?

Like the French frontier police who thought that some of Picasso's Cubist drawings were plans of the country's defenses.

Oh, if I could paint this, I thought. Ribbono Shel Olom, if I could paint this world, this clean world of rain and patterns on glass, and trees on my street, and people beneath the trees. I would even paint and draw pain and suffering if I could paint and draw the other, too. I would paint the rain as tears and I would paint the rain as waters of purification. What do they want from me? Ribbono Shel Olom, it's Your gift. Why don't You show them it's Your gift?

I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. 'The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line, Asher Lev. But we know it is not the same thing, don't we?

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly," I read in the collection of letters written by Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, "that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.… You must harness yourself to drawing.

I told her of a letter Camille Pissarro once wrote to his son about Monet's dealers, who were insisting he exhibit only one kind of painting, the one that had become very popular with collectors. The collectors only wanted Sheaves. Pissarro wrote that he couldn't understand how Monet could subject himself to the demand that he repeat himself. He called it a terrible consequence of success.

The tiny color planes in the Cézanne, like the pieces of a riddle, exquisitely explored, investigated, probed, resolved, each daub of color another piece of his answer to the greatest riddle of all: how we see and think the world.

How can we expect to know everything about God? He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. I call that ambiguity, I said. Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same thing. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That's what I'm trying to capture in my art. That's what I mean by ambiguity.

It was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.

He said to me one day in the second week of July, "Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower.

The gift had caused me to steal. I hated the gift. But I wanted to do the painting.