Art is a creative expression encompassing a wide range of human activities, products, and experiences, producing an emotional or aesthetic response. Here are what some have said about art, artists, and the artistic process.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. You cannot intellectualize creativity. You can think about something before or after — but not during.
There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
I am an artist and a political being as well.
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
In his later years Pablo Picasso was not allowed to roam an art gallery unattended, for he had previously been discovered in the act of trying to improve on one of his old masterpieces.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
My job is to keep the meaning completely embodied in the work itself, and therefore alive and capable of change. I think that’s how an artist can best speak as a member of a moral community: clearly, yet leaving around her words that area of silence, that empty space, in which other and further truths and perceptions can form in other minds.
When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
[To simplify] is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without — and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.
All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity.
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.
Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.
