Quotes about Art

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.

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.

In our human lives, we are often impatient, ill-tempered, inappropriate. We find it difficult to treat our intimates with the love we really hold for them. Despite this, they bear with us because of the larger, higher level of family that they honor even in our outbursts. This is their commitment.

As artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all. When we deal with one another, we are dealing not merely with our own human personalities but also with the unseen but ever-present throng of ideas, visions, stories, poems, songs, sculptures, art-as-facts that crowd the temple of consciousness waiting their turn to be born.

It is not the poet's business to save man's soul but to make it worth saving . . . However, few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged; -and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them.

A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique product. But why? It is unique not because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or sincere or idealistic or useful or educational - it may embody any of those qualities - but because it is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. It is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.