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Art Quotes

Seeing is an experience. People, not their eyes, see. There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.
N. R. Hanson
For me a painting is like a story which stimulates the imagination and draws the mind into a place filled with expectation, excitement, wonder and pleasure.
J. P. Hughston
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes it visible.
Norma Jean Harris
Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.
Rembrandt
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
Edward Hopper
All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.
David Hockney
Art happens - no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.
James Abbot McNeill Whistler
Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.
Paul Cezanne
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Pablo Picasso
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
Richard Diebenkorn
The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Art is the only means by which one soul can truly touch another.
Curtis Verdun
The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.
Wassily Kandinsky
The many great paintings of the world, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art. If you don't want the pleasure of art, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.
Thomas Moore
The secret of life is in art.
Oscar Wilde
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Georgia O'Keeffe
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting; and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.
Paul Gauguin
...the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Alberto Giacometti
I am an artist - I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.
Leonardo Da Vinci
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
Pablo Picasso
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
St Fancis of Assisi
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper
The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.
Delacroix
A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
A painting is good not because it looks like something, but because it feels like something.
Phil Dike
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.
Balthus
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
Paul Cezanne
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
Robert Motherwell
Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall
Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more human world.
Andre Maurois
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye - it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
Edvard Munch
Color in a picture is like the enthusiasm in life.
Vincent Van Gogh
Painting is easy for those that do not know how, but very difficult for those that do!
Edgar Degas
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.
Paul Strand
I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Vincent van Gogh
Painting, like music, has nothing to do with the reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood non-objective painting.
Hilla Rebay
A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
Hans Hofmann
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan
...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.
Constantin Brancusi
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.
Constantin Brancusi
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.
Carl Sagan
I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.
Paul Cezanne
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.
James McNeil Whistler
Art is the signature of civilizations.
Beverly Sills
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James McNeill Whistler
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Simonides
Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
Claus Oldenburg
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.
Fernando Botero
Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
Richard Diebenkorn
There is no 'must' in art because art is free.
Wassily Kandinsky
Abstract art isn't simply a lack of realism. It's rather a heightened depiction of what the subject really is.
Curtis Verdun
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
Joan Miro
If you work with abstract painting for a period of time, you may come to think of it as a melody, a song, a piece of beautiful music.
Judy Betts
Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall
Fill a space in a beautiful way.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso
I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...
Wassily Kandinsky
If apple is the language of the future, then art must be the core.
Elliot W. Eisner
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Pablo Picasso
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Michelangelo
Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.
William Baziotes
Art is a passion or it is nothing.
Robert Fry
All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.
Piet Mondrian
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.
Paul Gardner
Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.
Hans Hofman
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Jackson Pollock
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings
George Tooker
Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.
Paul Cezanne
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.
Piet Mondrian
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
Giorgio DeChirico
The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life.
Alain Arias-Misson
Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.
Marc Chagall
I paint not by sight but by faith. Faith gives you sight.
Amos Ferguson
In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Besson
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
Paul Cezanne
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
Mary Daly
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian
The goal of abstract art is to communicate the intangible, that which eludes the photograph and normal seeing.
Curtis Verdun
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
Living with and studying good paintings offers greater interest, variety and satisfaction than any other pleasure known to man.
Dr. Albert C. Barnes
Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.
Roy Adzak
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures.
George Braque