Quotes on Artist

You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

We're dealing with sophisticated customers. What's most important to these women is individuality. I have to create things she'll want to wear, no matter who she is.

The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.

Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

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

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

The artist does not illustrate science; ... [but] he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does, and expresses by a visual synthesis what the scientist converts into analytical formulae or experimental demonstrations.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it.

An artist must not feel under any constraint.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work; especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.