Popular quotes about Artist! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 49
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.
Madeleine L'EngleI wouldnโt want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but thereโs a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, youโre an artist and youโre a feminist.
Carolee SchneemannMy 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.
Edward Sorelyou don't need talent to be an artist. 'Artist' is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist, anybody can communicate if they are desperate enough.
Yoko OnoThere's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.
Annie LeibovitzAn 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.
Julia CameronActing is just another way to express myself as an artist. I realized if you're an artist, you're an artist and you can express that through music, through painting, through photography, through acting - this is just another way for me to express myself.
CommonBecause Ivy [Wilkes] is just starting out as an artist, I wanted to focus on [Georgia] O'Keeffe's experiences when she was just starting out. I suspect there is a difference between being an unknown artist and being a celebrated artist. When nobody knows your work, nobody except you really cares whether or not you paint.
Liza CampbellFor 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.
George CarlinI began to wonder - I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one - but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. Most people would look at those things and say, 'Well, that's nothing. What did you do that for? That's just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That's nothing. That isn't art.' They don't say that anymore.
Walker EvansWhen 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.
Milton ResnickMy 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.
Rainn WilsonIf 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.
Charles SaatchiAn artist creates songs and timeless moments that are reflections that impact culture, and you can do that in any way - with guitars, ukelele, a computer. So, that will never die. It's always the artist behind the computer, not the computer.
SkrillexI study everything that I do to become better all the time at my craft. The beauty for me about being an artist is that the dream will never die because I'm not obsessed with material things and don't care about the money and don't care about the attention of the public but only the love of my fans. For me it's about keeping the dream alive of how much more devoted, how much more honest, how much better of an artist can I become? That's the only fear that I ever have, that the dream will die.
Lady GagaEvery man or woman is a potential poet or artist. Everyone has the capacity to bring to their work the dignity, purposefulness, and presence of the artist.
Laurence BoldtI feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.
Henry MillerWhat a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
Patti SmithWhy is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.
Paula McLainA 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.
Jacob EpsteinThe artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
Andre GidePatti [ Scialfa] was an artist and a musician and she was a songwriter. And she was a lot like me in that she was transient also. She worked busking on the streets in New York. She waitressed. She had - she just lived a life - she lived a musician's life. She lived an artist's life. So we were both people who were very uncomfortable in a domestic setting, getting together and trying to build one and seeing if our particularly strange jigsaw puzzle pieces were going to fit together in a way that was going to create something different for the two of us. And it did.
Bruce SpringsteenREPLICA, n. A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the original. It is so called to distinguish it from a "copy," which is made by another artist. When the two are mae with equal skill the replica is the more valuable, for it is suppose
Ambrose BierceMy teacher introduced me to this photographer Eugรจne Atget. He was a French photographer in the late 1800s up until 1927 in Paris. He didn't consider himself an artist, but he was probably one of the artists of the 20th century. This guy documented all of Paris during those years. It's unbelievable. The books are phenomenal. The Museum of Modern Art has all his stuff now and [American photographer] Berenice Abbott saved his work. Not very much is known about his life, but the work is unreal and it totally spoke to me. He was the only artist for a number of years that I cared about at all.
Jeff VespaIf you want to compete in Italy, the only accepted ways are brute force, or cunning. Like Machiavelli says, "Fronte otra forze." And neither of these two "virtues" is suited to an artist. The artist has to stay intelligent.
Francesco ClementeI 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!
Andrew TaylorThat is the creative artist - a penalty of the creative artist - wanting to make order out of chaos.
Ursula NordstromWhen I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate'.
Robert RedfordThe teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
Paulo FreireIn 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.
Steven PressfieldThe 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.
Helen Foster SnowAn 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.
Wayne ThiebaudI invest because I'm really a firm believer in letting the artist make their work, if you choose to work with an artist then you give them the go-ahead.
Piper PeraboA 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.
SocratesEvery artist - even if they do Superman, they do Batman, and things like that - they are speaking about his life. Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.
Alejandro JodorowskyIn our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.
Salman RushdieIn 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?
Robert HenriBy being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.
Julia CameronI'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.
David FinchThe public so often want to freeze the artist in a moment in time when they were at their peak, and they want the artist to revisit it over and over again as if it was something authentic.
David SylvianHe was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the...he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him.
Bob ColacelloI think there should be a reworking of the value structure of art. The value is when the artist makes a first engagement with society. That work has the most value. That is the function of the artist. That result.
Lawrence WeinerI've been an artist forever. I started when I was in the third grade. I drew drawings of monsters and I sold them to my classmates for a dime. I studied painting. Originally I was a design and illustration major, but I met this girl. Back then, if you were a designer, you were a real sellout, and she was a real hardcore painter. I knew she would never take me seriously unless I was an art major, so I switched majors to fine arts. Anyway, we're married now. So it worked. How I got to my style? I'm a weird artist in that everything I do looks a little different.
Tony TassetWell, 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.
Van Dyke ParksThe notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been around since the Pharaohs. That the born patron also needs an artist to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon.
Shana AlexanderI'm a touring artist - I love going out and playing live, and I was sick of making records didn't translate well live - that misrepresented who I was as an artist. I'm not saying those records weren't good. I think they're great. I think a lot of them have great songs. My challenge was making the songs that were specifically great for the type of personality I wanted to present which was my personality - I wanted to get that across on record - and have something that was fun and energetic live.
Todd Carey