ART QUOTES V
quotations about art
One of the things pounded in to my head at the university level was that art is communication. So showing your art is not only good for your ego, but it's discovering you can be part of this conversation that has been going on as long as people have been painting in caves.
ROBERT LEMMING
"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Strong Opinions
When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Reifications"
All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust outlasts the throne,--
The Coin, Tiberius.
HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON
Ars Victrix
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Art Like Morality Consists in Drawing the Line Somewhere
Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988
The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
ROMAN PAYNE
Rooftop Soliloquy
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit