Artist Quotes - Page 55

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

Mostly, I believe an artist doesn't create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to point out what already exists, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it.... I didn't invent anything, I indicated.

We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.

It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Great artists have no country.

Pablo Casals is a very great artist. What I admire is the firm stand he has taken not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.

One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.... In this sense, the work as such is nonexistent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and viewer.

I am not afraid of beauty, unlike most artists today. The pollen, the milk, the beeswax, they have a beauty that is incredible, that is beyond the imagination, something which you cannot believe is a reality-and it is the most real. I could not make it myself, I could not create it myself, but I can participate in it. Trying to create it yourself is only a tragedy, participating in it is a big chance.

When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist.

I would like to see more airplay for all artists, no matter what age. I think there's a lot of money being spent toward the young guys, but a lot of the older guys are the ones who blazed the trail for those young guys.

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Most artists should be able to make the album that they want. You don't necessarily pick the singles that you want when you're making a record, but for the most part it's the same process.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh, he makes men instead of statues.

Emotion combined with an artist's discipline is the rarest thing in the world.

I never had the sense of myself as an accomplished artist, and I always had to work three times as hard as anyone else to make mypieces as good as they could be. I am never completely satisfied. There always seems to be something just beyond my reach.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.

Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.

I think every artist subconsciously wants to evolve themselves. Sometimes they get stuck in ruts because of pop culture, peer pressure, stuff like that. But what excites me most is exploring my own musical insights and expanding upon them.

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare.