Creating Art Quotes

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

When I am creating art, I have absolutely no social responsibility. It's like dreaming.

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

History reveals that left-brain people have been creating art for a long time now.

Every artist should live by these words: Never feel bad about successfully selling your creations. Never feel bad about creating art you can't sell.

Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

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

Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.

I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.

It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. Stop settling for what's good enough and start creating art that matters.

I probably sensed the serious formality of the ceremonies and felt what others were feeling then. Looking back, I'd guess that it had opened up a gaping hole in my psyche. In the process of creating art, I might be trying to fill that hole, or to reduce its depth, or to make it feel less hollow. I think that making art could have helped from that moment on.

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?

Creating art or something beautiful makes you a more fulfilled person than they can ever be because they're caught up in what they hate rather than what they love.

The process of creating art allows me to learn about the subject I'm illustrating. So, if I want to learn more about plantation life and slavery, I try to find clients that will give me an opportunity to work on projects that will visualize those experiences of the enslaved African and people of color. I get to learn about my roots, and my artwork allows the reader into that world by creating images that are accessible.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

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.

The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful.

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Creating art and creating ourselves are the same act; art, world, ourselves - these are continuous with one another.

We can't suddenly quit a job and then race to find a form of art that will pay off before the next mortgage payment is due.  Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it … Art isn’t about the rush of victory that comes from being picked. Nor does it involve compliance. Art in the post-industrial age is a lifelong habit, a stepwise process that incrementally allows us to create more art.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

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

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

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.

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

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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

Great art picks up where nature ends.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

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

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

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.

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.

Cinema informed my painting by the sheer geography - on locations, there is so much downtime. And when you're spending all this time creating art by committee, the concept of the singular voice is a pleasant antidote.

The Street is as large as consciousness itself. So, when creating art for the street, be mindful of where the public's head is at these days. Give the public a real alternative to the strict diet of celebrity gossip, religion, and un-reality television.

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

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it's trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.

He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.