Eric Maisel Quotes - Page 3

Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.

Do I doubt the painting I've just painted because it is not right or because I can never like what I do?

An ability to choose is a necessity for the artist.

The artist is a god, but he is also an idiot. That is the human way.

The artist must reckon with his own character flaws, which do not disappear just because he has been called to be an artist.

Chaos is everywhere - and artists, to fashion art and live truthfully, have no choice but to invite this unwanted guest right into the studio.

While some part of the artwork may fail, the whole may have its own unique importance.

Art and business may be strange bedfellows, but an artist must make room in her bed for both.

Deconstruction is great for the intellect, but it hurts the heart terribly.

The artist dreams of works of real breadth; but, limited by his personality and the nature of his medium, limited by inner disturbances and loss of purpose, he often works more narrowly than he'd intended.

Boredom is the thing that regularly arrives between excitements and episodes of meaning: it is as natural as the tides, and in it an artist can drown.

The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection.

Humanitarian convictions are the linchpins of our salvation, and these an artist must champion.

While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn't a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health.

The growth that an artist seeks is a fine combination of mastering craft, garnering an audience, maintaining one's mental health, and working mightily from a ever-expanding base of experience.

An artist's fine goal is to manifest a well-nigh heroic self-discipline, carefully attending to all that concerns him.

Artists have wild desires and a terrible hunger to achieve... Without it they haven't the juice for striving or loving. But desire also can make them greedy and turn dreams into unrealizable obsessions.

Hurray for criticism, if it means that an artist's voice is heard. Let the wise artist invite criticism and survive it when it comes.

Creativity is the gift that keeps on giving.

The artist must possess at least as much conviction as does his enemy, the dogmatic, mealy-mouthed, anti-art bigot.

Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent...Revealing secrets can bring us pain or get us into trouble, but worse pain and worse trouble await us if we keep silent… we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes. gr we become habitually untruthful. The door to our creativity closes.

Who knows how many artists fail because the light that shines through them is defracted in a thousand directions and not concentrated in a single beam?

A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.

The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.

To decide to reach for this blue and not that one, to switch styles or subject matter, to move, in the middle of a sentence, in one direction or another, to commit to this book when that one is also calling, are the sorts of choices that artists must make if they are to function.