Quotes About Art

The only way to reform modern lettering is to abolish it.

You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious.

Writer's block comes from one's wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.

Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder.

Rothko's paintings consist of strong formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

As Rothko was to say about these later works, "A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience.

Following the lead of Paul Cézanne and the Cubists, Greenberg saw that the distinctive feature of painting is its flatness; therefore, he thought that painting should purge itself of all illusions of depth and turn that concern over to sculpture.

Until the twentieth century, Western art had traditionally portrayed the world in a three-dimensional perspective, using recognizable images in a familiar way. Abstract art broke with that tradition to show us the world in a completely unfamiliar way, exploring the relationship of shapes, spaces, and colors to one another.

They explored the nature of visual representation by reducing images to their essential elements of form, line, color, or light.

My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

I don't know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else's erotica that you don't like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren't for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. —Jerzy Kosinski

You want to be a poet and not die.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

If I loved him, would I censor my writing to please him? If I married him, would I force my writing to be married as well?

Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering, Don't embarrass the family.

Si eres una hembra y tenías talento, la vida resultaba una trampa, no importaba el camino que eligieras. O te sumergías en la vida doméstica (y tenías fantasías a lo Walter Mitty para fugarte) o suspirabas por la vida doméstica en todo tu arte. Nunca podías escapar a la condición de hembra. El conflicto estaba escrito en tu mismísima sangre. Miedo a volar

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.

The individual act of will is the strongest, most transcendent part of us. To look upon something with our deepest overriding passions, whether it be rage, grief, hope or love, and yet recognise a greater need or goal, and to say, "I will do this" or "I will not do that", no matter what the personal cost, is a triumph of the spirit. The exercise of the will is the art of humans in the state of being.' --

Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.

He dreamed of becoming a fully illustrated man.

For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community — connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.