Quotes About Art

ONE CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS THAT ART escaped from religion and into the larger world.

As her writing developed, Jane Austen recognised that there were different ways of creating original works of art and that the skills acquired from experience and experimentation were ultimately as important as the initial sparks of inspiration.

There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all, this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture, and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

For if my poems have always been about survival--and I believe they have been--then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.

No matter how difficult the subject, while writing, a poet is unchained from sadness, and free —Jane Hirshfield

What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is "beyond grasp." Even the mind of the author cannot seem to keep what has been found: great poems exceed their creators. They are more capacious, capricious, compassionate, original, witty, strange, avaricious for beauty and range. The writer's life, the historical times, do not make the art. Art makes art.

I have learnt to spin words like dervishes, to bewitch and blur reality.

Kintsukuroi is the name for this ancient Japanese art, which teaches that broken objects are not something to hide away but should be displayed with pride, for they are stronger and more beautiful for surviving the breakage. I think I, too, am stronger and more beautiful for surviving

I slept in a bedin a room with paintingson the walls, andplanned another dayjust like this day.But one day, I know,it will be otherwise.

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

A soldier's body is a work of art that contains his country's history.

True creativity comes from enjoying the moments, which then fulfill themselves, and a part of the creative process is indeed the art of relaxation, the letting go

I believe only in art and failure.

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time, I have ideas for paintings all the time, and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad, which I design on, and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

People ask me how I keep my figure, and I tell them it's because I paint. When you're covered in paint, it's quite hard to put food in your mouth!