Quotes About Art

Rodin's art 'was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realisation of something small, upon something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique. There was no arrogance in him, he devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty must come when all was ready for it as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.

Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

To study one good master till you understand him will teach you more than a superficial acquaintance with a thousand: power of criticism does not consist in knowing the names or the manner of many painters, but in discerning the excellence of a few.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.

If some people see angels where others only see empty space, let them paint the angels; only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.

Now observe; if the artist does not understand the sacredness of the truth of Impression, and supposes that, once quitting hold of his first thought, he may by Philosophy compose something prettier than he saw and mightier than he felt, it is all over with him. Every such attempt at composition will be utterly abortive, and end in something that is neither true nor fanciful; something geographically useless, and intellectually absurd.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

you never will love art well, till you love what she mirrors better

All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace... there is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle.

to some of the best and wisest artists among ourselves, it may not be always possible to explain what pretty things they are making … the very perfection of their art is in their knowing so little about it

Great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

Our objective, let it always be remembered, is not the attainment of architectural data, but the formation of taste.

The demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression.

She had eyes that Rembrandt would have painted.

Shipley—One Toke Over the Line Ramones—I Wanna Be Sedated The Clash—Should I Stay or Should I Go Talking Heads—Burning Down the House Dmitri Shostakovich—Jazz Suite No. 2: Waltz 2

Lucas rode up to Kidd's floor in a freight elevator that smelled of oranges and bananas and paint and maybe oil, walked down the hall and knocked on Kidd's hand-carved walnut door, which Kidd said he'd copied from some Gauguin carvings. Lucas wouldn't have known a Gauguin carving if one had bit him on the ass, so when told about it, he'd just said, "Hey, that's great," and felt like an idiot.

other story. The drawings have gotta