Quotes About Art

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

Strange—we are always inhabiting more than one realm of existence—but they all fit in if the art is right.

Acting is the art of speaking in a loud, clear voice and the avoidance of bumping into the furniture.

You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.

Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another.

People have the idea that an image must stand for something else, that the real meaning needs to be described with language. Instead it is the image itself that is the meaning.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

All great works of art are trophies of victorious struggle.

Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible.

Painting is a means of self-enlightenment.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

Hardening of the categories causes art disease.

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

Some people's photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that's fine. But that's not why I do them. I'm a gun for hire.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can't, you're dead.

There is never a lack of subject matter; just absence of creativity.