Quotes About Artist

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.

My one failing as an artist is that I depend on reference material to perhaps a greater extent than I should. Delacroix said that if you can draw a man falling out of a window and have the drawing finished before he hits the ground then you're a real artist. I wasn't that kind of artist.

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.

Now the expectation is that, once the public decides that the artist is gentrified, the public demands that the artist stop growing. And [the public] actually puts all their energy into reasserting or re-establishing what the artist has long ago left behind. Because that's what they want. The source of creativity, the gift that's been given, be damned.

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.

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.

An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter. We meet our truth and we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression.

It's a good feeling to be at a place where you know who you are as an artist. I didn't know back then, I just wanted to give my family a better life and myself. I wanted to sing, but I didn't know as an artist who I wanted to be and because of all those experiences, it helped shape me into who I am and what I've now realized and what it is that brings me happiness which is when I pick up the guitar and do records.

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?

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

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.

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.

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

I think I'm enjoying writing for me.I know what's in my head, so there's a little less margin for error, but I think I really would like to write for an artist, and obviously it really depends on the artist, and the sort of story I would do.

There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.

I take cabs if I need to get somewhere or I take car service. I don't drive, I wouldn't mind riding a bike... People think that because you become an entertainer you gotta have this rock star thug image. I'm an artist, man. I'm going to live like an artist.

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.

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.

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

Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear.

When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.

The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.

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.

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!

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he or she stole, and from whom? With the artist it is not how much he or she took from whom, but what the artist did with it.

The artist as an artist must be an anarchist

My whole family is very art-based. My sister runs a gallery, my other sister works for PACE in New York, my other sister is a sculptor. I'd say the ending one is me because that's the artist and the artist feels a lot.

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.

I think the role of the artist today is about being provocative. I don't mean shocking, but you have to provoke people into action. As an artist, you ask people for their time. It's the most precious thing anyone has. I'm asking audiences to come to my work and spend some time with it. What I'm really doing, of course, is asking people to take time for themselves.

An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations.

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.

Do not hate or fear the artist in yourselves... Honor and love him...do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourself is more truthful than the night.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.

I can't think outside of [bein' an artist]. That's how deep I am into this, and so focused that I really can't think, like, if I wasn't an artist, what I'd be doin' in school. I'm pretty sure I'd be doin' it - if I didn't go into music, I'd be working, have a regular job or something probably, and goin' to school like everybody else and all my other peers around my age.

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

I'd really want to - just from my own experience as an artist working with a writer, I'd want to do everything I could to tailor it to the artist I was working with.

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".

The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music.

A record deal doesn't make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

Every artist returns to things. The drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist, no doubt they crop up again and again.