Art Quotes

Seeing is an experience. People, not their eyes, see. There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.

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.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes it visible.

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

Art happens - no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

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.

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.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

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.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

Art is the only means by which one soul can truly touch another.

The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.

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.

The secret of life is in art.

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.

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.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

...the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

I am an artist - I am here to live out loud.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life.

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.

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

A painting is good not because it looks like something, but because it feels like something.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more human world.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye - it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

Color in a picture is like the enthusiasm in life.

Painting is easy for those that do not know how, but very difficult for those that do!

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.

I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

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.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

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.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

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.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

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.

There is no 'must' in art because art is free.

Abstract art isn't simply a lack of realism. It's rather a heightened depiction of what the subject really is.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

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.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.

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...

If apple is the language of the future, then art must be the core.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

Art is a passion or it is nothing.

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.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.

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.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

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.

The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

I paint not by sight but by faith. Faith gives you sight.

In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

The goal of abstract art is to communicate the intangible, that which eludes the photograph and normal seeing.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Living with and studying good paintings offers greater interest, variety and satisfaction than any other pleasure known to man.

Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us.

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

The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures.