Quotes about Art

How infinitely happier and more grateful is the whole personality or spirit when it finds something nourishing in art or writing or thinking, than the mere mind or intellect is:  the kinship you celebrate in these personalities is your own dismembered Orpheus stumbling across another fine organ to rejoin to itself.  I put it this way:  aristic psyche loves itself enough to chasten itself, to put itself through boot camp for the sake of being competent for life, alive to life.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

So worried was I that people would see through the painting into my soul - and guess at secret Alison stuff - that I scraped the paint off the canvas. It was too risky to expose what everyone hides...And yet isn't that the job of the artist? Next step is to take the risk - to work more deeply. To expose that which cannot be expressed any other way. That is art. Scary and exciting.

When you feel you are being moved by the creative spirit, you are in fact being moved by the divine feminine.

If you have picked up this book and begun to read, chances are you have experienced the power of the creative spirit. This power is not a figment of your imagination; it is not an abstract concept. It is real. It is a force that manifests itself, not just mentally and spiritually, but physically. If you don't believe this, the next time you feel the urge to create, sit with the feeling. Go to a place of stillness, become completely in touch with your body, bring your consciousness to bear on this urge, and you will feel it in your body: a sensation, perhaps almost imperceptible, that begins in the nest of your pelvis, then rises up, reaches your heart and throat, and bursts into an aching, a longing, a profound need.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rater than seen.

"If we do not see the beauty of God in this life then we will never see it in the next life.  We must see the glory of God in the smallest flower."

Gerontissa Makrina (+ 1995)

It has been said that art is a tryst;
 for in the joy of it,  maker and beholder meet.

It’s not about facts, it’s about feelings. It’s about remembering feelings and happiness.  A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It’s the most abstract of all art expression.

There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall .... Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into  it .... as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

You can’t make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can’t make a perfect painting.

Pollock was terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of worry about this world. Ran around and dripped, and then he managed to express ecstasy.

What I say is that we’re capable of a transcendent response, and I think it makes us happpy. And I do think beauty produces a transcendent response.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They’re just horizontal lines. There’s not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect — completely removed in fact — even as we ourselves are.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.

Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time.

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one's mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.

Some people want to make the world a better place. I just want to make the world a better-looking place.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

I love you more than my own skin.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.