Artist Quotes - Page 75

Creativity is the mother of all energies, nurturer of your most alive self. It charges up every part of you. When you're plugged in, a spontaneous combustion occurs that 'artists' don't have a monopoly on.

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.

Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

What a severe yet master artist old Winter is... No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble and the chisel.

You can have a phenomenal booth artist and he can get in there and be a technician in the booth and it won't translate on the stage. I think that's what makes emcees emcees. Some rapper dudes are great rappers but it don't translate on stage.

Jerry and I always felt that the character was enjoying himself. He was having fun: he wasn't taking himself seriously. It was always a lark for him, as you can see in my early drawings.

The goal of the artist is not to resolve life's mysteries, but to deepen them.

The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life, and from their hands it comes in fair, articulate forms to bless the world.

I learned the tricks... If you want to do academic things, you can do them. It is not difficult. Yet it is from this difficulty - the mistakes and dead ends - that artists develop, not through the quick solutions and not from something you learn and apply.

The ability to draw from life determines the artist's skill. This is why live drawing classes have always been at the top of the curriculum for properly structured academic workshops.

People are still tied to their hoods, and it's usually not the artist, it's usually the friends and instigators who get it popping.

The responsibility of the artist is to transcend the human ego.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

Clever people can copy the handwriting of an artist - it's like forging a person's signature.

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life.

If an artist tries consciously to do something to others, it is to stretch their eyes, their thoughts, to something they would not see or feel if the artist had not done it. To do this, he has to stretch his own first.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.