Quotes About Art

I think one should pay so much attention to technique, don't you? Like learning to draw before you paint.

She's also in love with the 'Polish Rider'. Who's he? A picture by Rembrandt.

She did not understand music and it upset her, it had only sad, tragic things to say. These leaping forms, these pursuits and insistences, these elusive desperate repetitions, always seemed to her like one long cry of agony. She could not, in this company, allow herself the luxury of self-pitying tears, which was her highest tribute to the art. She looked about her and let the music gather to her the people with whom she was so deeply concerned.

Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusions, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points.

Do you think she'll change? Hope nothing. Is there a cure? Only art. Or more love. I should die of more love.

The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it.

It was the books I started reading. It was the music I started listening to. It was the television I started watching. I found myself thinking again. I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn't. Wen all this is in your head it has to come out into your life. If it doesn't, you get crushed. I'm not going to get crushed.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

Artists thrive on suffering.

I will be an artist. I am sure I will. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Vincent did not know how to express his feelings in words. He knew how to paint them. However, one cannot paint the farewell.

Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.

The sculptor is master of time; he can change his subjects forward or back.

A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.

Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.

L'arte è fatta per coloro che si sente indegno senza di essa.

The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.

As he went about to the other workrooms he realised that every painting was a self-portrait even when it was a still life or a scene over the roofs of Paris; for no man ever pictured anything but himself, his core, the things that he was basically. With every brush stroke the artist was mercilessly exposed: he could not conceal nothing, he could pretend to be another person, to believe in other values, but in the end he would fool no one.

An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.

They had painted in a grand rush to keep intact the purity of their first impression, the mood in which the motif had been conceived.

Per me [la creazione] è come una giornata d'uragano quando la tramontana s'abbatte fischiando dai monti. L'arte per me è un tormento, angoscioso quando il lavoro va male, estasiante quando va bene: ma sempre mi possiede senza scampo. Al termine della mia giornata, sono un guscio vuoto: tutto ciò che v'era in me, è passato nel marmo o nell'affresco. Quindi non mi resta più nulla da dare altrove.

Na?i ?e se drugi papa, ali nikad više ne?e biti Boti?elija.

Very well, Vincent, said Zola with a smile, you have been nominated for the cult of ugliness. Do you accept the nomination? Alas, said Vincent, I'm afraid I was born into it.