Quotes on Creating Art

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.

great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.

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

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms, Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

… lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

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