Quotes About Artist

I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.

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.

When you are writing for an artist you are trying to get into that artist's point of view. What does that artist want to say? What do they care about? And musically, you want to show off that artist.

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.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

An artist's career doesn't happen in the cycle of one week of news. An artist's career happens in a lifetime, and if you're a true artist you're willing to die for what you believe in.

How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

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?

Though the artist must remain master of his craft, the surface, at times raised to the highest pitch of loveliness, should transmit to the beholder the sensation which possessed the artist.

The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

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.

An album for me as a teenager in the '70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. Maybe one of the songs is really poppy and you listen to it on the radio as a hit single and then more of the world is about to find out about this artist by buying the record.

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.

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

Every time I'm in the studio, I always think of my professor in undergrad. He was like, "There are so many artists in the world. If you're going to be an artist, make sure you have something to say. Don't just be an artist and put out bullshit. Have something to say." I guess that would be my philosophy and something I think about all the time. Every day when I'm in the studio I hear him and I see him. I remember him saying it in class. So that's something that I always want to make sure I have: I'm saying something with the work.

The worst scientist is he who is not an artist; the worst artist is he who is no scientist.

I mean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, I think the young kids sell lot of records. But for an older kind of artist, more of a sort of heritage, vintage type of artist, you have to think outside the box.

There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, "What do you think about audience?" they would probably say, "I don't think about audience, I only think about my work," yet the audience is such an important part.

All art is propaganda. ... The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can't just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. ... Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. ... Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. ... I want to use my art as a weapon.

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.

If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference.

I can't draw. I can't paint. But what I can do is tell somebody else what to do. I'm a creator. I can tell an artist what to do. I can be behind the artist. I have the eye, so I can move things around. I can put stones together. I can match them.

Working a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you. I dropped out of college at 21 and my illustration hadn't yet taken off. It is more than working in a store. It is a hard way to make a living but you earn more than in a similarly unskilled job.

I wanted to be acknowledged as an artist, not just some kiddie-book artist.

Artists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist-hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.

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.

I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.

Just because I'm a recording artist doesn't mean I'm not an artist. Because I had to grow.

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

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

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.

I think you have to accept that an artist also has a relationship with his or her art and his or her fans: you are in an open relationship whether you like it or not. Give the artist room to go into the place they create (literally or metaphorically) . And love them when they can't remember where they put their keys.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.

We're in a post-conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are prized rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work. Today, our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman.

I'm still an artist who's searching, trying to evolve, an artist who - nine times out of ten - is dissatisfied with her work, and beats herself, and goes out there and tries again and again, and falls on her face and looks for new challenges.

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

I think Damien Hirst is hilarious. And I think he's a true artist. He's not hilarious first; I think he is a real artist, and I also think he's got an amazing sense of humor.