Quotes About Artist

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. . . Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one

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.

I wouldn’t want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but there’s a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, you’re an artist and you’re a feminist.

Being an artist doesn't mean that you're a good artist. That was the bargain I first made with myself: I'd say, I'm an artist, but I'm not really very good.

There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

When I was setting out to be an artist, I said: If I can just produce one work that some people think is good, if I can become an obscure cult artist, that's all I want. Well, I attained that. I'm an obscure cult artist, and I think now, Why didn't I say I want to be another Picasso or something? What other options were open to me? But I was convinced I couldn't achieve great things because I don't have a steady-state mind.

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.

To call yourself a Chinese artist or woman artist or African artist reflects a certain kind of condition. To me, that is not necessary.

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.

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.

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.

I could play it safe by recording songs that are familiar, but am I expanding myself as an artist by doing covers? It's a catch-22. It's called show business: The word 'business' is in it, and you've got to be a businessman. But then again, you have to be true to yourself as an artist.

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

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.

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

Every 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.

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.

I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.

I believed in myself, and I've always worked very, very hard as an artist, and I am an artist in every sense of the word.

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.

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.

You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the 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.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

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.

It's important to tell the artist's story. It's their song! And it's always more fun to write together with the artist!

I am very much a woman, but I never consider that I am when I go and make films. I don't check into the world as a woman everyday. I check in first as an artist and mother, then as a daughter sister, and friend - but always as an artist.

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.

The 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.

Guillermo del Toro. He's in his pure artist's stroke. He's just hitting it out of the park. I would go anywhere to work with him. He's a real artist.

In England, pop music seems now to be exclusively for children. If an artist is no good, why is it necessary to have that artist repeatedly rammed in our face?

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

When you become an artist you're working away from home for so much time. You really see what the use of time means to you once you're an artist and you travel so much.

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

I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

I used to flirt with fundamentalism, and I had this idea that creation was something that happened. Now I see creation as something that is happening. Hundreds of millions of stars are still being born every day. Creation is an ongoing process. The Artist has not yet cleaned out the brushes. The paint is still wet. Human beings are the small clumps of clay and breath, and we have been handed brushes of our own, like young artist apprentices. The brushes aren't ours, nor the paint or canvas, but here they are in our hands, on loan. What shall we make?

I like the word 'artist,' but I don't like the word 'artist' inside my house.

Any artist always has misgivings about calling himself an artist.

If an artist does not have an erotic involvement with everything that he sees, he may as well give up. To be a human being may a very messy thing, but to be an artist is something else entirely, because art is religion, art is sex, art is society. Art is everything.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.

I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.

I am not a Christian artist, I am an artist who is a Christian.

He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.

An artist, if he is truly an artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men, to have mankind and womankind realize that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.