INSPIRATIONAL ART QUOTES BY THE FAMOUS ARTISTS AND GREAT PAINTERS - a selection
An artist can offer us a lot of inspirational force by his or her quotes on life and creating art. Here you find inspirational quotes & quotations by the greatest artists; you click the artist name you want to read his or her personal quotes:
JOSEF ALBERS - CARL ANDRE - KAREL APPEL - HANS ARP - WILLIAM BAZIOTES -
JOSEF ALBERS, his inspirational quotes:
* When we are honest – that’s my saying – if we are honest then we will reveal ourselves. But we do not have to make an effort to be individualistic, different from others.
* That’s so exciting. That is one of the secrets of life. Why did I sometimes build a lamp in the Bauhaus and somebody comes from Holland and says, “Oh, somebody in Holland makes just the same lamp.” Such duplicity shows that the time is ripe for a problem and thus it is in the air, and will be solved here – and there. With this we are finding the “creative process”.
(more inspirational artist quotes by Josef Albers in art quotes, Albers)
CARL ANDRE, his inspirational quotes:
* When you desire a work of art and make it, you’ve added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.
* I don’t really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way.
(more inspirational artist quotes by Carl Andre in art quotes, Andre)
KAREL APPEL, his inspirational quotes:
* Nothing is isolatable or can be removed from its environment. Anything which becomes isolated ceases to exist. It is like the violent refusal of someone to play a game in which everyone cheats.
* The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.
(more inspirational artist quotes of Karel Appel in art quotes, Appel)
HANS ARP, his inspirational quotes:
* I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it (automatic painting, fh). I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands.
* The terrible confusion of our era is the consequence of overrating reason… …reason uproots man and make him lead a tragic life.
* i was born in nature. i was born in strasbourg. i was born in a cloud. i was born in a pump, i was born in a robe.
(more inspirational artist quotes by Hans Arp in art quotes, Hans Arp)
WILLIAM BAZIOTES, his inspirational quotes:
* To be inspired. That is the thing, to be possessed; to be bewitched. To be obsessed. That is the thing. To be inspired.
* If people stand and look at the moon and one says ‘I think it’s just beautiful tonight’ and the other says ‘The moon makes me feel awful’ we are both ‘clear’. A geometric shape – we know why we like it; and an unreasonable shape; it has a certain mystery that we recognise as real; but it is difficult to put these things in an objective way.
(more inspirational artist quotes by William Baziotes in art quotes, Baziotes)
MAX BECKMANN, his inspirational quotes:
* The Ego is the great veiled mystery of the world; I believe in it and in its eternal, immutable form. Its path is, in some strange and peculiar manner, our path. And for this reason I am immersed in the phenomenon of the Individual, the so-called whole Individual, and I try in every way to explain and present it. What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.
* …all important things in art since Ur of the Chaldees, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits… … Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement, for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our Ego that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.
* I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a ‘philosophical conception’ painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.
(more inspirational artist quotes by Max Beckmann in art quotes, Beckmann)
JOSEPH BEUYS, his inspirational quotes:
* The ego must be developed, not for its own sake, but because it is needed by society. If you are only interested in self-realization then you cannot make a good painting. To do this you have to have thought about forming, and about how ideas of forming stem from history. - A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of.
* Art alone makes life possible – this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms… …I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences. The provocateur of the chemical processes is located outside the world. Man is only truly alive when he realizes he is a creative, artistic being… …Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.
* Man is really not freeing many aspects. He is dependent on his social circumstances, but he is free in his thinking, and here is the point of origin of sculpture. For me the formation of the thought is already sculpture. The thought is sculpture.
(more inspirational artist quotes by Joseph Beuys in art quotes, Beuys)
UMBERTO BOCCIONI, his inspirational quotes:
* A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of.
(more inspirational artist quotes of Umberto Boccioni in art quotes, Umberto)
GEORGES BRAQUE, his inspirational quotes:
* It is the limitation of means that determine style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.
* The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.
* In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits.
* I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence – what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.
(more inspirational artist quotes of Georges Braque in art quotes, Braque)
ANDRÉ BRETON, his inspirational quotes:
* When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought. Perhaps my dream last night follows that of the night before, and will be continued the next night, with an exemplary strictness.
* Put yourself in the most passive, or receptive, state you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and those of everyone else.. tell yourself that literature is the saddest path that leads to everything. Write quickly, without a preconceived subject, fast enough not to remember and not to be tempted to read over what you have written.
* Go on as long as you like. Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur. If silence threatens to settle in if you should ever happen to make a mistake - a mistake, perhaps due to carelessness - break off without hesitation with an overly clear line. Following a word the origin of which seems suspicious to you, place any letter whatsoever, the letter “l” for example, always the letter “l,” and bring the arbitrary back by making this letter the first of the following word.
(more inspirational artist quotes of André Breton in art quotes, Breton)
PAUL CÉZANNE, his inspirational quotes:
* We are civilized beings. Whether we like it or not, we have the cares and concerns of classical civilization in our bones. I want to express myself clearly when I paint. In people who feign ignorance there is a kind of barbarism even more detestable than the academic kind: it’s no longer possible to be ignorant today. One no longer is. We come into the world armed with facility. Facility is the death of art and we must rid ourselves of it.
* Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature’s straying hands… …From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colours, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together… …They make lines, they become objects – rocks, trees – without my thinking about them…
* The artist’s whole aim must be silence. He must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget… …And then the entire landscape will engrave itself on the sensitive plate of his being.
* Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet. That’s why colour appears so entirely dramatic, to true painters.
* Basically I don’t think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them on to my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose, any old way. Sometimes that makes a picture. I’m brainless animal. Very content if I could be just that …
(more inspirational artist quotes of Paul Cézanne in art quotes, Cézannne)
MARC CHAGALL, his inspirational quotes:
* …In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others.
* The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.
(more of his inspirational quotes you can find in art quotes by Marc Chagall)
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, his inspirational quotes:
* The structure of cities, the architecture of houses, squares, gardens, public walks, gateways, railway stations, etc – all these provide us with the basic principles of a great Metaphysical aesthetic… …We, who live under the sign of the Metaphysical alphabet, we know the joy and sorrows to be found in a gateway, a street corner, a room, on the surface of a table, between the sides of a box…
* To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.
(more of his inspirational quotes you can find in artist quotes, De Chirico.)
