Art & Artists

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.        –Jean Arp

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble. –Louise Bogan

For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif. –William Adolphe Bouguereau

Truth exists; only lies are invented.            -Georges Braque

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. –G.K. Chesterton

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom….The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. –G.K. Chesterton

Art is the fatal net which cathces these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men. –Giorgio de Chirico

Draftsmen may be made, but colorists are born.   -Eugène Delacroix

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time. –Otto Dix

Art is the most passionate orgy within man’s grasp. –Jean Dubuffet

The excellent is new forever.                    –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is either plagiarism or revolution. Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them. –Paul Gauguin

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty? –Paul Gauguin

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.      –Edward Hopper

It’s (the lack of communication between the people in his paintings, ed.) probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don’t know. It could be the whole human condition. –Edward Hopper

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term ‘life’ as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena before it can again be great. –Edward Hopper

The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.              –Edward Hopper

More of me comes out when I improvise.           –Edward Hopper

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible. –Paul Klee

Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter. –Paul Klee

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers. –Paul Klee

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will. –Paul Klee

Art exists only to communicate a spiritual message. -Alphonse Mucha

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks… Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time. –Emil Nolde

The artist need not know very much, best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks. –Emil Nolde

Colours in vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death. –Emil Nolde

Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them. –Emil Nolde

Sometimes it seems to me that I am capable of absolutely nothing, but that nature through me can accomplish a great deal. –Emil Nolde

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.      –Emil Nolde

It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color. -Maxfield Parrish

Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!              –Maxfield Parrish

The artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual centre of sensations, always pliant, hypnotized by the marvels of nature which he loves, he scrutinizes. His eyes, like his soul are in perpetual communion with the most fortuitious of phenomena. –Odilon Redon

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt. –Odilon Redon

A painting is complete when it has the shadow of a god. –Rembrandt

The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be. –Norman Rockwell

I know of no painless process for giving birth to a picture idea. When I must produce, I retire to a quiet room with a supply of cheap paper and sharp pencils; my brain knows it’s going to take a beating. –Norman Rockwell

All great artists are amateurs. –Erik Satie

Art is a weapon that penetrates the eyes, the ears, the deepest and subtlest human feelings.   –David Alfaro Siqueiros

The transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Prostestant world-feeling (…)           –Oswald Spengler

Those who create their own worlds are generally the poets. –Andrei Tarkovsky

I don’t belong to any school. I work in my corner. I admire Degas.                          –Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Technique does not constitute art. Nor is it a vague, fuzzy romantic quality known as ‘beauty,’ remote from the realities of everyday life. It is the depth and intensity of an artist’s experience that are the first importance in art. –Grant Wood

God

“When you define God properly as ultimate reality, every experience that you have is a tangible interaction with God. You can’t recognize God as being the entity that is making things happen, but in order to actualize your destiny, things have to happen in a way that you don’t necessarily perceive. In other words, you have one event here, and it kind of turns you around, and then there’s another distant event that happens—and all of these nonlocal events add together to guide you in the proper direction. But you don’t see all of these events at once, so you can’t recognize a hand that is actually reaching into reality and moving things around at your behest. It’s the problematical linkage between ontology and epistemology—what is, and what you can know about what is. Unfortunately, we have certain epistemic limitations: we can’t necessarily see or get to the bottom of how things are caused in our lives, and this prevents us from seeing the existence of God or achieving certainty about it. The way I go about achieving certainty is actually by going back to logic. You can use logic to put together a very advanced system in which you can derive truths about reality—not necessarily about specific things that happen in reality, but about the overall patterns in which they happen.”                  –Christopher Langan

“God is light. Not just a light, but a self aware, self existent, unconditioned light imbued with spontaneous thought and consciousness. Everything conditioned is an echo from the unconditioned, spontaneous mind of God.”         –John McRae

Modernism

Part of me, rather perversely, likes industrialization in an Ayn Rand sort of way—I’m critical of the ugliness and sort of debauched modernity that it’s led to—its sort of barren and desiccated quality—but, on the other hand, there’s a part of me that admires thrusting modernism in its energy and achievement. I’m torn between the utilitarian, sort of dourness of what a lot of modernity’s become, and the freshness and the energy which transpired at its beginning. So I tend to take, in a Nietzschean way, from different concepts like romanticism and modernism, things which I like. I tend to view things positively rather than negatively; I tend to be dialectical. So there are parts of modernism that I choose to admire and revere, and there’s parts that have led on to things which I dislike or despise. So my view doesn’t tend to be either/or—it tends to be synthetic, in a sense, or syncretic, whereby I take up all sorts of tendencies and use them in a firmament of becoming. -J. Bowden