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Art and the Artist Quotes and Quotations
 (Ars longa, vita brevis.) Art is long, life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.  A work of art cannot be satisfied with being a representation; it should be a presentation. An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint. Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art. Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists. Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back. As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely. Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in. Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish. Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country. I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value? I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black. If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them. Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it. Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion. Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures - of these, 3,000 are in existence. Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me. Style, like the human body, is specially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted. - Tacitus The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing. The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction. The object of art is to give life a shape. The scholar seeks, the artist finds. The song of the brush. Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case. Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter. We live in a rainbow of chaos. We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it. When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said, "It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David." Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness. Art is I, science is we. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined, out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. Designers and free lance artists and editors can set their hourly rates by dividing their annual income needs by 1000. Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again. When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist. . . faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state. Art is the expression of an enormous preference. Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, is what makes the difference in all art. An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. All profoundly original art looks ugly at first. Pioneers did not produce original works of art, because they were creating original human environments; they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them. Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has worked through, and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them. A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling. Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. Culture is something you cannot buy, something you cannot import, something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer, an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple, enduring elements of everyday life; elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation. Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity. All art is a revolt against man's fate. Art is a delayed echo. Art is a kind of illness. One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes it visible. The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself, to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask, including new ones they are just learning how to frame. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Art is man's nature; nature is God's art. With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance. All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.' Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story. In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting. The cheap, no matter how charming, how immediate, does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through. A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament. Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce. Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it. What's an artist, but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around? Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself. Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles. As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child. Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art. Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man. It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found. An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it. I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work, you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value. One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes it visible. The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself, to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask, including new ones they are just learning how to frame. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Art is man's nature; nature is God's art. With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance. All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.' Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story. In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting. The cheap, no matter how charming, how immediate, does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through. Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand. Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them. Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. The artist, like the idiot, or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it. Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today. Art isn't something you marry, it's something you rape. It's not what you see that is art, art is the gap. I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead. An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form. Art upsets, science reassures. An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art. Art is either plagiarism or revolution. The father of every good work is discontent, and its mother is diligence. A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject. The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect. Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear. We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us. Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later. Caricature is rough truth. A work of art is an exaggeration. Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies. When one admires an artist it is important not to know him personally. 
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