Quotes About Art

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.

Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting…

I want to paint the way a bird sings.

Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.

Water Lilies' is an extension of my life. Without the woter the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers

The essence of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment.

I must have flowers, always and always.

I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.

Avec l'amour, l'amitié et la fraternité d'action, l'art est le plus court chemin d'un homme à un autre.

La littérature est parfaitement inutile, sa seule utilité est qu'elle aide à vivre.

Nunca hay que escribir con la concha

modo: "Lo cierto es que las catedrales no significan nada especial para mí. Nada. Catedrales. Es algo que se ve en la televisión a última hora

underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage.

As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling." —

The purpose of art," James Baldwin wrote, "is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers." He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky's statement that "we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles, and what counts first and last in art is quality; all other things are secondary.

I'm not a very good painter, but I'm learning a lot.

Fingernails filling with silt, scraping the sculpted...

The perfect tattoo... the one I believe we are all struggling toward... is the one that turned the jackass into a zebra.