“Art is man’s constant effort to
create for himself a different
order of reality from that which is
given to him...” “It was the job of Art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into Awareness...” Michael Crichton “Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality...” Robert M. Pirsig “Art is a jealous Mistress...” Ralph Waldo Emerson “Art...is an attempt to bring order out of chaos...” Stephen Sondheim A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires. A great artist is always before his time or behind it. A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. A picture is a poem without words. A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light. A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. All art is but imitation of nature. All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it. Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness. Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor. Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint. Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. Art is either plagiarism or revolution. Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. Art is man's expression of his joy in labor. Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth. Art is not a thing; it is a way. Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art. Art is science made clear. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. Art is the proper task of life. Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men. Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time. Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies. Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued. By the work one knows the workman. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. Even a true artist does not always produce art. Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. Every artist was first an amateur. Every artist writes his own autobiography. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. Every good painter paints what he is. Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product. Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul. Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse. Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. Give me a museum and I'll fill it. Great art picks up where nature ends. I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes. I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. I cry out for order and find it only in art. I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. I have been no more than a medium, as it were. I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me. I paint with shapes. I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize. I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good. If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. In art as in love, instinct is enough. In art the best is good enough. In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist. My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process. My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art. My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see. My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. My painting does not come from the easel. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language. Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. Of all lies, art is the least untrue. Our natures are a lot like oil, mix us with anything else, and we strive to swim on top. Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. Personality is everything in art and poetry. Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. Photography is a major force in explaining man to man. Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture. Rules and models destroy genius and art. So vast is art, so narrow human wit. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun. That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind. The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them. The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist. The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above. The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing. The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress. The awareness of our own strength makes us modest. The beginning is the most important part of the work. The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person. The history of art is the history of revivals. The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public. The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art. The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist. The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. The most profound things are inexpressible. The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. The perfection of art is to conceal art. The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. The real art of conducting consists in transitions. The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination. The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts. The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal. There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. Things are beautiful if you love them. This world is but a canvas to our imagination. Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect. To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first. Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. Trying to force creativity is never good. Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture. We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. We have art in order not to die of the truth. What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process. When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God. When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake. You don't take a photograph, you make it. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. More to come soon... |
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