Quotes About Artist

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can't feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn't capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won't put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn't a great artist.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

I just think that Jack White is the consummate artist - an artist's artist. I'm a huge fan.

Artists draw for themselves, If someone draws for them, theyre not an artist. An artist is someone who makes their own music and albums. Artist think music is a drawing, and they draw theirs.

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.

I like to tell the artist what the song or album means to me, in detail. Then I let the artist run with it and create in an unrestrained manner. Once the artist gets back to me with a few ideas, I like to do the little changes to make it perfectly speak to the audience.

I started blogging because I didn't know if I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to talk to other people online who were doing art, so I would post work and ask for feedback. I loved that an artist like James Jean would show his process on his blog. It became this open dialogue that, unfortunately, we don't have a lot in the fine-art world. People will say, "Wow, you share a lot." I'm like, "No, I make it a point to." Instagram is a great place for people to share failure. I don't want people to think that being an artist is some glamorous life.

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

I think great art goes beyond the control of the artist. In some ways, art often makes itself and reveals things about that artist that maybe the artist is not fully conscious of.

Because the artist deals in future realities, he always seeks improvements or changes in the existing reality. This makes the artist, inevitably and invariably, a rebel against the status quo. The artist, day by day, by postulating the new realities of the future, accomplishes peaceful revolution.

For a long time, I've distinguished between entertainer and performer and entertainer and artist. To me, an entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself.

When you don't know how to pick up a brush, you don't know anything; at that moment you're an artist. I'll simply say, 'If you know less, you're better off as an artist.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time. He was always so frustrated having to work to support the family that I was like, I'm never going to do that. I don't want to just be working a menial job to support my family and dreaming of being an artist. We learn from our fathers in that way.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

I want to go and see things as a fan again. I am a fan, but I can't remember what it feels like to be a fan anymore. Because I've become an artist. I've become the artist.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

I was never shielded from the realities of what it meant to be an artist and that made me afraid to be an artist because I wanted to know that my life was secure.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.

There is nothing harder for an Artist than to retain his Artistic integrity in the tomb of success. A tomb, nevertheless, which nearly every Artist: whether he admits it or not; naturally wants to get into.

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

I think that it's much easier for a recording artist to become an actor than for an actor to become a recording artist.

I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.

The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.

... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.

I have a master plan as an artist. I've always said I'm not going to be punching nobody's clock. I will work as an artist to survive in this world.

THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait.

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

The war between the artist and writer and government or orthodoxy is one of the tragedies of humankind. One chief enemy is stupidity and failure to understand anything about the creative mind. For a bureaucratic politician to presume to tell any artist or writer how to get his mind functioning is the ultimate in asininity.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.

I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

To all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

The really cool thing about reggae music is that I can get away with saying spiritual things as a reggae influenced artist that I couldn't get away with saying as a rock artist. Reggae has such spiritual roots and people almost expect to hear spiritual things.

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.

I remember the excitement of being a new artist. When up and coming artists ask me like, "Any advice you have for me?" I always say, "Take it all in because you'll never be a new artist again".

And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.

Every successful artist comes from a family - parents or siblings or both - who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the treacherous and difficult path of the artist.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

The visual world has blown up, the world of writing has blown up; there's so much text online. Anyone and everyone can express themselves. It's a lot to think about as an artist. Also, that the persona of the artist might actually be of some importance. When I came of age, it was important to be quiet and hang back and be mysterious. I knew artists who didn't even want to show up at their own openings. They never wanted to have their picture taken, didn't want to autograph a book, didn't want to answer a question. I came of age in a world where it was "Let the work speak for itself."

The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about.

Maybe my work looks a little crazy, a little insane, but I don't really see myself as a crazy artist or a shaman artist.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration - since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business - he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once.

If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.

Any artist always has misgivings about calling himself an artist.