Popular quotes about Artist! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 62
The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
D. H. LawrenceI 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.
Tony KushnerI was worried that I, the artist Morimura, would have conflicts with the participating artists and develop a strenuous relationship with them. But the actual experience was completely the opposite. The artists accepted my requests rather positively, because it came from a fellow artist. I strongly feel that the fact that my being an artist avoided the usual curator vs artist tension, and led to creating a positive atmosphere as well as developing a solidarity amongst artists and building a community for artists.
Yasumasa MorimuraThe artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.
Robert AltmanMaking 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.
Susan SontagAn artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Henry Miller"Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother."
Ralph Waldo EmersonThere'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 LeibovitzMy work is always based on reality. I'm not an artist that creates works of fiction. I'm not an artist who is in my studio inventing things out of my imagination - everything is based on reality, on real facts.
Alfredo JaarThe Man of Genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an Artist, but the two are not to be confounded. The Man of Genius,referred to mankind, is an originator, an inspired or demonic man, who produces a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored. The artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. There has been no man of pure Genius, as there has been none wholly destitute of Genius.
Henry David ThoreauEven Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he'd done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work-the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo's. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.
John HustonEvery 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.
Peter BiskindEvery artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and image, and no one else's. This is why it is difficult to fit the artist into a world that has already been created, a seven-day, fixed and solidified world: he will inevitably slip out of the set of laws and paragraphs, he will be a heretic.
Yevgeny ZamyatinArtistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist's work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.
Jerry SaltzI really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Andy WarholThat is the creative artist - a penalty of the creative artist - wanting to make order out of chaos.
Ursula NordstromI 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.
Mira CalixI 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 PeraboI'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.
John LennonI just really feel so grateful to Sundance because I've always been an artist and I've never been able to make a living at being an artist until Sundance.
Lynn SheltonAn artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
Robert HenriI'm not conditioned to be an entertainer. An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself. The problem with that is artists are misunderstood by all. I'm not interested in the clarinet but in music. we speak our emotions into music. An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away. My situation is the same. Let them concentrate on my music and not on me. I like the music. I love it and live it, in fact. But for me, the business part of music just plain stinks.
Artie ShawI always wanted to be an artist. I think I was just waiting on somebody to approve me and be like, "Oh, okay, you should be an artist," you know 'cause it wasn't until I stopped looking for approval that I could actually do it.
PJ HarveyI 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.
Neil GaimanThe product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.
David MametThe main difference between the art of the actor and all other arts is that every other [non-performing] artist may create whenever he is in the mood of inspiration. But the artist of the stage must be the master of his own inspiration, and must know how to call it forth at the hour announced on the posters of the theatre. This is the chief secret of our art.
Constantin StanislavskiIf the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
James WhistlerEvery single item that we come into contact with on a daily basis has been designed by an artist. From the toothbrush we use in the morning, to the defibrillator that could save our lives, an artist is behind the design.
Jarrett J. KrosoczkaWhat is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... Itโs this in-between that Iโm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.
Federico FelliniThe moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.
Oscar WildeStill,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.
Will EisnerThe artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.
Gus Van SantMichael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, periodโฆ He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!
Berry GordyThe 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.
Joseph CampbellThat is an artist as I would have an artist be, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art--panemet Circen.
Friedrich NietzscheI have always felt the word 'advertising' is either a diminutive or derogatory term that kind of goes with stuff people don't like, and I always felt frustrated because I felt like I was a communication artist or a media artist. The best advertising is one of the art forms of our culture.
Lee ClowI read once that [Pablo] Picasso felt if an artist ever felt totally satisfied with a work she ceased to be an artist. With that in mind, it seems like goals are a terrible idea then.
MiloMy process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist. I've never made a video where I didn't talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment. Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators.
Adria PettyWhy should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
W. Somerset MaughamOne thing about Kurt [Cobain] is before he was a musician, and before he was a rock star, he was an artist, and an artist with a capital A. What that means is that he had to create. It wasn't something that he chose to do - it chose him.
Brett MorgenI always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.
Patti SmithA work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
Sol LeWittAs an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don't do that with men - nobody says Picasso, the male artist. Curators call me up and say, "We want your work to be in a show about women artists," and I'm like, why? For Christ's sake, do we have to attach a gender onto everything?
Patti Smith