Quotes on Art Is

Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.

The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse — it will not submit to the mold of flattery.

Concision in art is a necessity and an elegance. The verbose painter bores: who will get rid of all these trimmings?

Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Art is the proper task of life.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

. . . the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.