Art(Related Subjects: Writing, Poetry, Music, Criticism)

• [Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. -Al Capp (1909 - 1979)
• Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. - Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947), Dialogues (1954)
• Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. - Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
• Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925)
• Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. -Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)
• Let each man exercise the art he knows. - Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.
• I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none. -Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)
• So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. - Brenda Ueland
• I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned. -Brooke McEldowney, Pibgorn commentary, 03-31-05
• I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.- Charles Rosin, Northern Exposure, Aurora Borealis, 1990
• Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature. Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)
• If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life. -Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992
• I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. - Duke Ellington (1899 - 1974)
• 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.- E. M. Forster (1879 - 1970)
• Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. - Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
• A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world. -Edmond de Goncourt
• Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do. - Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)
• Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. - Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)
• Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. - Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
• Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
• Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings. - George Tooker
• What I dream of is an art of balance. - Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), O Magazine, April 2003
• Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
• Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost. - Isak Dineson, 'Babette's Feast'
• The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)
• It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it. - Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994
• You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands. Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994
• We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. - John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), October 26, 1963
• Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. - John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925), quoted in Bentley and Esar, Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951)
• To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. Joseph Chilton Pearce What we play is life.- Louis Armstrong (1900 - 1971)
• All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.- M. C. Richards
• Creativity is...seeing something that doesn't exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God. - Michele Shea
• I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it. - Miguel de Cervantes (1547 - 1616), Exemplary Novels (1613)
• I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.- Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. - Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
• Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.- Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
• There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun. - Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
• There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
• Art is either plagiarism or revolution.- Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)
• I shut my eyes in order to see.- Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)
• Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision. - Penn Jillette (1955 - ), Interview in WIRED magazine, 1993
• Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.- Piero Milani
• The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel. - Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)
• Every artist was first an amateur. - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
• Repetition is the death of art. - Robin Green, Northern Exposure, Burning Down the House, 1992
• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.- Scott Adams (1957 - ), 'The Dilbert Principle'
• All art is an imitation of nature. - Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD)
• Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech. - Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)
• Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.- Stephen Nachmanovitch
• Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.- W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
• Life isn't long enough for love and art. - W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), The Moon and Sixpence
• Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself. - William Baziotes