Quotes About Art

Born in Chicago, Harmon studied at the Art Institute and graduated in 1901 from Columbia University's School of Architecture

It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.

In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.

By means of tracing-paper I transfer my design to the wood and draw on that.

What we keep finding out again and again is that recipe cooking is to real cooking as painting by number is to real painting: just pretend. The problem is that we don't seem to be able to grasp it. We keep trying—with a different cookbook.

The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.

Poetry is the practice of creating artworks with language. Sculptors use marble, steel, cardboard, pâté, whatever material they choose. Musicians use sound. Painters use paint. Furniture-makers use woods and fabrics. And poets use language.

What art offers is space — a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive. Some day all of this will have to be will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

If it's not worth making beautiful," Valiha said, "it's not worth making.

I have nothing to say. And I am saying it. That's poetry.

I respect everything I make fun of.

Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art - the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions - love, hate, and anger - thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die.

He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which is simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man.

He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.

There is so much that is not said. I almost believe that the form has not been devised that will let me say what I need to say.

Midas, they say, possessed the art of old Of turning whatsoe'er he touch'd to gold; This modern statesmen can reverse with ease — Touch them with gold, they'll turn to what you please.

What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from "Pawley's Peepholes

You should understand that I did not want you to read a painting. I/ wanted you to bathe in it before words domesticated the experience,/ and you turned to such stand-bys as "illumination" and "transcendent"/ to describe what happened to you. Painting should not be sentenced to/ sentences.

Around this time she started wearing T-shirts with skeletons and rhinestones on them and, with her already-tattooed friend Billie, she went downtown and got the names of her three kids tattooed on her left shoulder. Her family was horrified, which pleased her.

Everything makes me nervous - except making films.