Quotes About Artist

Why was the painting made? What ideas of the artist can we sense? Can the personality and sensitivity of the artist be felt when studying the work? What is the artist telling us about his or her feelings about the subject? What response do I get from the message of the artist? Do I know the artist better because of the painting?

There questions of wanting to be an artist, and what does that mean, what makes you an artist? Are you an artist if you're in a gallery in New York and not an artist if you're doing it at home? Do you need legitimation to count? If you've been acculturated to believe that you have certain obligations - familial, social, human - if multitasking has been your forte and that's what's been praised and rewarded, where do you find the single-mindedness, the selfishness to do something like art? I think those are questions that arise differently for women and for men.

I never considered myself an artist. I aspire to be an artist, but I never thought I had the depth or substance or gift to be an artist. I do think I have some talent, but it doesn't go as far as being an artist.

When a record company makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When a manager makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When the artist makes a mistake, the artist pays for it.

I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I've spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

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.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists. An artist is someone who makes art too. He did not invent it. How it started — "to hell with it." It is obvious that it has no progress. The idea of space is given him to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space. He fills it with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.

A photographer is a photographer and an artist is an artist. I don't believe in labels or titles. Why should a painter or sculptor who has probably never challenged the rules be an artist just because his title and an art school education automatically make him one.

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.

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

The Best of the artist's art, which will one day be in a Museum wall, the Painting that sets the artist apart of all other artist artists.

I think historically there have always been new ways to find an artist. From seeing somebody in a club traditionally to running across them on YouTube, it's always shifting. But the age-old thing holds true: Is the artist unique? Are they talented? And can they communicate? Can they actually reach an audience and hold their attention?

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

I always talk about if you want to be an artist, you have to be authentic because people can tell bullshit a mile away. There is nothing wrong with creating a character, standing behind that character, and that being an authentic performance piece, because that's a piece of art as well. But if you want to be an artist in any form, you have to know to come with it.

[...] I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.

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.

The idea of using media for expressing yourself artistically is kind of something I learned from my mother and my father. So for me, I think growing up wanting to be an artist, I always imagined myself sort of crossing over or mixing media and so it was a natural evolution for me to try to express in a filmic way or in a visual way. It just kind of seems like a natural sort of progression for me in terms of what I'm trying to do as an artist.

I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I'm really mad for art history and the masters mostly.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees. They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist and empathize with the human experience, unless you know your truth and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

I discovered that it was a lonely world being a solo artist. Then I started working with another solo artist, Rod Stewart, and he used to tell me how lonely he was!

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.

There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination.

The artist as an artist must be an anarchist

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

In the hierarchy, the artist faces outward. Meeting someone new he asks himself, What can this person do for me? How can this person advance my standing? In the hierarchy, the artist looks up and looks down. The one place he can't look is that place he must: within.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

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.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.

Well, this week's peeve might be... when art writers talk about an artist's 'efforts,' meaning their work. It always sounds patronizing to me, like 'I'll give you an E for effort.' How about the artist's 'effortlessnesses' instead? It's certainly something, or at least the appearance of something, that I aspire to myself.

I love the idea of finding new talent, however you do it, and the television mechanism - seeing artists grow and rise to the occasion - is a medium that actually works because there's a way for the audience to get to know an artist and for the artist to improve.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.

It shouldn't matter what your sexual orientation is, you just need to be great at what you do. If you're an artist, be a great artist.

Every science touches art at some points—every art has its scientific side; the worst man of science is he who is never an artist, and the worst artist is he who is never a man of science.

An artist who doesn't have any audience is not an artist.

Today it's not strange to see an artist 30 years old having her first retrospective! Different time, different speed. After having been the key point of recognition for an artist, the museum today is just another place to experiment and work, like we can do in any art fair. The king or queen of the moment is completely ignored and replaced by the new one a few years later. Contemporary novelty in art disappears faster than the seasonable changes of the fashion designs.

Well, to me, the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of daring-do, self reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value.

If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question.

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.