Quotes About Art

Violence is part of everybody's life, whether you like or express it or not. My work utilises all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I'd rather it be out than in.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

If you're a new artist, practice your art and share it. Set up shop somewhere, whether it's a street corner or a coffee shop. I got my start in a coffee shop that didn't even have live music. I wanted to play in coffee shops that did have live music, but I didn't have an audience.

Anything that's made by humans is about humans, whether it's about gods or aliens or anything; it's about some sort of expressive nature about us.

'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

Art, a book, a painting, a song, can definitely inspire change, whether it's a small change or a big change but you know there's novels I've read or a scene in a film that I've seen where I definitely inspired something and made a change or addressed an issue in my life or done something cliche like make a phone call.

I want to keep educating the world on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. It's who I am. It's what I know - even more than basketball. To be able to promote it or educate it or teach it in a way, whether it's through cultural centers or dancing or art or anything like that, I think is what I would want to do.

For a filmmaker, whether the film is liked, understood or appreciated counts as much as the moolah.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

Color is a power which directly influences the soul.

Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

Drawing is the only thing I've found in which I can lose myself completely. I love it. It started as something that relaxed me, but now it's a struggle because I'm pushing myself. The day-to-day sketching is fraught.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.

Music should be made to make people forget their problems, if only for a short while.

While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.