Quotes About Art

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the play and the opera, And grace before the concert and pantomime, And grace before I open a book, And grace before sketching, painting, Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Her hair was the gold of gold paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much.

If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white with a roller.

Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the market price for art. The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the infamy of it, were uppermost in his thoughts;

images of the Madonna and the Christ Child carved in ivory and exported to Europe.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

The painting has a life of its own

Every good painter paints what he is.

It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.

I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them

The painter locks himself out of his own studio. And then has to break in like a thief.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

Age settled with more grace on ordinary people, but for celebrities Ã¢â'¬â€ women stars in particular Ã¢â'¬â€ age became a hatchet that vandalized a work of art.

only when we have a respect for time will we have learned something of the art of living.

But the thing is, in all my experience as an artist, I have found that there are people who want to destroy beauty. Is that because it's beyond them? Is it because beauty represents something they cannot have, or is not inside them?

With a true masterpiece, there are no words required. Discourse is rendered redundant. That's why the work of a master transcends all notions of education, of class. It rises above the onlooker's understanding of what is considered good or bad, or right or wrong in the world of art. With the artist who has achieved mastery, skill, experience and knowledge are transparent, leaving only the message for all to see.

I am no longer an artist interested and anxious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn in their lousy souls. —Paul Nash, Artist 1899–1946 Paul Nash served with the Artists' Rifles and the Royal Hampshire Regiment in the Great War.

And so another storyteller fell asleep that night thinking not of the telling of the story but of the possibilities inherent in color and texture

that's why I came back to art, after the war—it's a license to be a bit strange, after all; I sometimes think people expect it, so the fact that I am different doesn't matter.

They say the face tells all there is to know about a life, but I personally believe much can be deduced from the hands. There are lines and scars, bumps and calluses; indeed, the hands are both the sketch and the final work of art.

But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.

A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals while others neglect their usual concerns - art, philosophy, scholarship - because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea.