THE LAST OF ARTIST QUOTATIONS!

These are pretty much the last of the quotations I’ve collected over the years.  I’m particularly thankful for those of you who have sent me your favorite quotations.  Please feel free to do so, and I’ll add them to my book of quotations.

 

“The painter today has a choice: to break new ground and try to do what has never been done or to paint the uncommonly common in a way that reflects insights that are personal yet unique for anyone who encounters them.” Elizabeth Mowry

“That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his compositions neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids.” John Constable

“Great art depends on exaggeration for expressive effect.” Skip Lawrence

“Art is the proper task of life; art is life’s metaphysical exercise.” Friedrich Wilheim Nietzsche

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” Plutarch

“Everything is related to everything else.” Leonardo da Vinci

“Form is the outer expression of inner meaning.” Wassily Kandinsky

“The gift is not the act of painting; it is the passion to paint.”  Unknown

“Drawing requires no exceptional ability, only normal vision and a degree of coordination.” Nita Leland

 

MORE ARTIST QUOTATIONS

Hopefully, you are enjoying reading the quotations from artists I have collected over the years.  Some of them associate the Divine Creator with the creative process.   Some can be applied to other areas of our life than just the visual arts.   Here are a few more:

“This is the real test of your emerging creativity–doing work that is neither repetitive of your previous work nor a copy of the work of others.”  Nita Leland

“When your creative self calls, go with it. It is God speaking. Listen to your creative conscience, the voice of the Divine guiding you each day. it resides in your heart. Go there and roam. That is your true temple.” Lalia Copoechione

“The object of painting is to evoke emotion in the viewer.” Elizabeth Grover

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” Emily Dickinson

“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.” Shakti Gawain

“Follow your bliss, and doors will open where there were no doors before.” Joseph Campbell

“To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.” Robert Frost

“Chance is always powerful. let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.” Ovid

“Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation.” Thomas Merton

“All arts are derived from the breath that God breathed into the human body.” St. Hildegard of Bingen

 

MORE ARTIST QUOTATIONS

I have a gang of these – thanks to all who sent quotations I didn’t have.  Here are some more:

“You’re not a reporter but an artist. A painting is a statement of the heart.” Ann Pember

“I don’t want it true; instead, I want a beautiful lie!” Edgar Whitney

“The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist.” Unknown

“In creating, the only hard thing is to begin.” James Russell Lowell

“If you are afraid of making a crazy mistake, then you’ll never get any bright ideas either.” Unknown

“A creative act is not necessarily something that has never been done; it is something YOU have never done.” Unknown

“Action is the fundamental key to all success.” Pablo Picasso

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”  Andrew Wyeth

“You use the arts to see your soul.” George Bernard Shaw

“A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.” Eugene Delacroix

“To work with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.”  Thomas Cole

“…it is the soul, not the eye, that sees.”  John Ruskin

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”  Aristotle

Which is your favorite?

FAVORITE QUOTATIONS ABOUT ART

I thought I’d start out the New Year by sharing with you some of the quotations about the making of art that I’ve collected over the years. They mean something to me, and may be meaningful to you as well.  Some of these are anonymous (meaning I don’t know where they came from), and some aren’t.  I have given the author’s name where I can.  So here goes:

“Painting the verb, the act of doing it, is more important than painting the noun.”  Gerald Brommer

“When you watch children paint, they are not concerned with end results at all.  They’re just thrilled with the process of expressing themselves. I think all artists need to step back once in a while and remember to enjoy painting and not be so concerned about end results. Art is about expressing yourself. The end result is just a bonus.”  Sandra Meyer

“Every artist should be afraid of doing a painting where people don’t do anything; where people don’t react; where they say, ‘Well, that’s a pretty picture’ and move on.”  Dean Mitchell

“Landscape is a medium for ideas…the various details in a landscape painting mean nothing to us if they do not express some mood of nature as felt by the artist.”  Robert Henri

“The whole fact is that art and science are so closely akin that they might well be lumped together.” Robert Henri

“Do not let beauty in the subdivisions destroy the beauty or the power of the major divisions.”  Unknown

“Paint the things that mean the most…the things you’d grab if the house were on fire.”  Unknown

“Never let reality stand in the way of imagination.” Elizabeth Grover

“Art is just another language for praying to God.” Unknown

“What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of the business of making a picture.” Robert Henri

MORE WILL FOLLOW IN SUBSEQUENT POSTS — WHICH IS YOUR FAVORITE?