Artist Quotes - Page 113

Artists know that you can take an advertising sign and make something joyful with it. It's sometimes hard for people who don’t make things to understand labor and joy and attention and whimsy.

You know, it’s the same thing as the question of free will and destiny, the question of creativity - you, the artist, you’re not the puppet of the piano, you’re not the puppet of the muse, but you’re not its master, either. It’s a relationship, it’s a conversation, and all it wants is to be treated with respect and dignity - and it will return ten thousand times over.

All that I have to offer as an artist is the revelation of my soul

I am thankful that geniuses and artists and good people, no matter how hard it is, will eventually be recognized. I am doubly thankful that also goes for idiots.

It is only after years of struggle and deprivation that the young artist should touch color - and then only in the company of his betters.

Artists create out of a sense of desolation. The spirit of creation is a excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul.

Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets.

All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I've always had a weakness for heroic imagery.

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.

The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians: the most skilful artists were procured form the adjacent cities; a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements; and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness, and as the glory, of Antioch.

The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it... because you cannot compromise an artist's vision.

I was a very introverted individual and this became an important outlet for me to express myself, to communicate, to take positions, make statements, take a stand and so forth. But I never really thought I had much a future at all So the thing that I had to do was to really go inward and really work super hard in the hope that someday it would pay off. And in using that term I don't mean necessarily money, but just the fact that I would have more depth and dimension both as a human being and as an artist.

The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.

I like getting my own thoughts out right now, I have fans to solidify, so that's why I don't do tracks with too many younger rappers or newer artists. People may consider me to be a music snob or whatever, but I like to preserve what's mine and I also don't just do tracks to do tracks, I make every song with a purpose.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

The anarchist philosophy is that the new social order is to be built up by groupings of men together in communities - whether in communities of work or communities of culture or communities of artists - but in communities.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

Computers are another tool for the creative artist - just as a flat or filbert brush is. But there was a time when I left a jar of medium open by my work station for that painterly smell.

A lot of artists that I've met let me know they're huge fans of mine.

I think that as an artist, the more that you can do to diversify, and kind of challenge yourself, the more you grow.

perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

Growing up I wasn’t sure I was female. As I grew further I wanted to be a lesbian but I wasn’t sure I would meet even the most basic membership criteria (though eventually I created a ‘femme dyke’ persona that worked well for over fifteen years). It wasn’t until my early twenties that I was sure of at least one thing: I was an artist. Quite an accomplishment for anyone assigned female at birth in a culture that calls only male artists ‘great’.

People are afraid to ask musicians to be involved in projects because they anticipate being turned down. Young artists hesitate before contacting me. People in my position don't get approached often enough.