DINTENFASS	COOKE	MICHELANGELO	VARGAS LLOSA	BACON	CARAVAGGIO	KRAMER
LEONARDO	HUGHES	RIVERA	KAHLO	EISENSTEIN	LANDIS	FEIGEN

"It's a disease -- being an artist. They cannot do anything other than what they are doing." - Terry Dintenfass

Thirty-three years later, he still works full time as a photographer. "Oh, I have to." he said, looking at me in surprise."

"I have a compulsion to paint, or draw, or paste, or form, or combine, or twist, or scratch, or scrape, stamp,
or glue or more, if I discover how.... I must work hard; though well into my eighth decade, I am still a young painter
and feel the need to make up for all the years I spent doing other necessary things." - Rebecca Rikleen

"Nobody makes you do it." - George McNeil

"The artist is a blessing unto others-a curse unto himself." - Carl Jung

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed
with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him." - Carl Jung

"Few people know how to see, to see well, to see fully." - Pierre Bonnard

"In whatever one does, there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart. One must come to one's subject
in a pure spirit. One must be strict with oneself. There must be time for contemplation, for reflection about the world
and the people about one." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life." - Goethe

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." - Susan Ertz

"Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men."
- Baruch Spinoza

" None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not." - Baruch Spinoza

"A lover of solitude, he nevertheless surrounded himself with with admiring friends." - William Grimes

"Just before his death, he [Michelangelo] burned a large number of his drawings, sketches and cartoons
to prevent anyone from seeing the labours he endured ... for fear that he might seem less than perfect." - Giorgio Vasari

"I am an artist. I am afflicted." - Tracy Lee

"Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty, concur in maintain
that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination--sculpture, painting, written fiction--is so purely in the imagination,
that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth."
- Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

“Even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if
I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.” - Thomas Hardy

"I want to be an artist, that's all." - Eugene O'Neil

"Historically, artists possess a critical and discerning intellect with the ability to see through layers of illusion
to the underlying truth." - C. J. Collins

"It's wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown." - Edgar Degas

"I'm not an actor. What does it mean, 'celebrity'? I call myself an 'artisan'. Anyone with sensitivity is potentially an
artist. But then, you must have concentration besides sensitivity." - Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Painting for me is a compulsive act. The only things that break its continuity are other compelling necessities,
such as writing, housekeeping, meetings and teaching." - Anthony Toney

"Some artists are destined to endure the hazards of ' interesting times' ." - Hilton Kramer

"Symptoms of the artistic temperament should be fought to the death." - David Graham Phillip

"Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman."- Guillaume Apollinaire

"[Art is] an attempt to escape from life." - H. L. Mencken

"Nor do I think that artists can necessarily be held to the standards of decorum of historians." - Diana Wright

"Well, art makes an interesting life. Sometimes we paint; sometimes we don't. But we never stop seeing the world
through artist eyes; never stop processing information through an artist brain.." - Joanne Mattera

"I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring." - James McNeil Whistler

"Great art is always about human nature." - Michael Kimmelman

"Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait." - Lucian Freud

"Describe not the object itself but the effect it produces." - Stéphane Mallarmé

"Color has taken hold of me. I don't have to try to capture it. It will posses me always.
That is the meaning of this happy hour. I know it. Color and I are one. I am a painter." - Paul Klee

"The painter should be solitary and consider what he sees and speak with himself,
choosing the most excellent parts of everything he sees. he should be as a mirror and
change himself into as many colors as there are in the things that appear in front of him.
In doing so he'll seem to himself a second nature." - Leonardo

"Do not defend your [art]. This is your chance to sit back and to observe what [viewers] make of your [work].
It is not the time to tell them that they have misunderstood it or to otherwise try to defend it.
In the “real” world, you will not be able to follow your [art] around and explain it or answer criticism.
If [viewers] do not understand what you have [done], you need to ask yourself whether that is because
they are weak [viewers]... or whether it is because there is something in your work that is confusing,
unclear or just plain mistaken. While you cannot really control [viewers], you can make your [artwork] clearer,
easier to read and more persuasive without sacrificing integrity. In the process, you will become a better [artist]."
- Michael Pettinger

"I make little claim to being an artist in the romantic sense of that mauled and blurred word.
I am a fine craftsman." - Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"The artist's world is limitless. it can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep." - Paul Strand

"The consummate artist conjures up the imageof a human being that will live on in the richness of its
emotional texture when the sitter and his vanities have long been forgotten." - E.H. Gombrich

"Los artistas son personas complicadas, no tienen que ser unos santos. No hay que idealizarlos.
Importan sus obras, no sus vidas." - Mario Vargas Llosa in Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto

"One's mind is the world. Those who give expression to it are what we call artists."
- J. D. Landis in Longing

"To create a work of art is to create the world." - Wassily Kandinsky

“I want to go out and see if I can just forget about art and art history and go out with a brush and try to do
some honest painting.” - John Myatt

"Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye."
- Lucian Freud

"Art is the expression of experiences and discoveries meaningful to humanity." - Anthony Toney

"So may night continue to fall upon the orchestra, and may I, who am still searching for something
in this world, may I be left with open or closed eyes, in broad daylight, to my silent contemplation."
- Andre Breton

"My greatest obstacle has always been me." - Robert Coane

"I refuse to adapt or integrate myself." - Imre Kertesz

"One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one." - Imre Kertesz

"Blessed are the artists who, owing to family history, innate talent and an indomitable will,
are born to their vocation. What a lot of false starts, wasted energy and deferred achievement
they are spared!" - Hilton Kramer

"There are men whom nature has made small and insignificant but who are so fiercely consumed
by emotionand ambition that they know no peace unless they are grappling with difficult or
indeed almost impossible tasksand achieve astonishing results." - Giorgio Vasari on Brunelleschi

"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good." - Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

"Most artists have one idea, or maybe two. In the best circumstances, that's enough for a career."
- Michael Kimmelman

"There is service to art which goes beyond convenience." - Daniel C. Dugan

"If I were certain that all my paintings would be burned, I think I'd go right on painting
-- yes, I'd go right on painting..." - Georges Braque

"So now he occupies a niche, like most artists worth remembering, based on only a few years' work
that nnevertheless still speaks to us."- Michael Kimmelman

"Millions of artists create; only a feware accepted or even discussed by the public, and of those,
even fewer are consacrated by posterity." - Marcel Duchamp

"Artists...are different from other people, they feel things more." - Barry Unsworth

"An artist at work is merely mad; an artist not at work is wholly mad." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"For some artists, not working is just a less productive, more tormented form of working." - Roberta Smith

"But Art, my dear Cornish, is a cruel obsession, as you may yet learn."
- Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"[Art's] what exalted you, and {art's} what cast you down." - J. D. Landis in Longing (Paraphrased)

"He who is born with a talent for a talent finds in it his happiest exhistance." - Goethe

"How do we know we are artists? ...All one can express at any moment is himself...
What if I have merely suffered as an artist but, in the end, produced nothing that might be called Art?"
- Robert Schumann

"He is one of those curious cases of a coarse man capable of making the sweetest art,
as if a hard outer shell were protection for a soft heart." - Michael Kimmelman

"I don't go along with the idea that every mark an artist makes is significant. That would be arrogant."
- Howard Hodgkin

"His art seemed dangerous to man but entailed a vulnerable openness on (Caravaggio's) part,
an exquisiteness of feeling that would've had some need of social armor
for going about the ordinary business of life."
- Peter Robb in 'M', The Man Who Became Caravaggio

"My honors are misunderstanding, pesecution and neglect, enhanced because unsought."
- Thomas Eakins

"No man, and least of all myself, could ever disentangle the feelings that animated him."
- Thomas Eakins

"I am a perfectly straightforward character with all my cards on the table.
But there are so many cards." - Picasso

"No question, Chardin was one of the greatest artists who ever picked up a brush
- and all the greater for paintin without the attributes of greatness...
There was nothing extraordinary about his career
except the beauty of the works it produced." - Robert Hughes on Jean-Siméon Chardin

"Anyone else will have all of my faults but none of my virtues." - Picasso

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier you'll be a general.
If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope.'
Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso." - Picasso

"I think art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves."
- Francis Bacon

"To be an artist at all is a form of vanity." - Francis Bacon

"Like any monomaniac, Gauguin was in the Gauguin business, aggressively, competitively, full time...
he labored to orchestrate his European reputation from several oceans away. It was a demanding job.
It entailed not only creating art of extraordinary quality,
but also inventing a persona with which to promote it."- Holland Cotter

"Generosity is a powerful spur to talent." - Giorgio Vasari

"An artist's time limits him." - Clifford Still

"Do not define today. Define backward and forward, spatial and many sided.
A defined today is over and done with." - Paul Klee

"Most of the Goyas we rightly regard asmasterpieces were not seen by the public in the artist's lifetime."
- Robert Hughes

"In the true artist, Art and life were one." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"If you want to live as an artist - just live...just be." - Mikhail Priorov

"Rubens was a happy man of action who was also a painter of genius.
Velázquez was a true professional." - Kenneth Clark

"Ars longa, vita brevis." - Latin Proverb

"The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance.
It is with the future that we have to deal.
For the past is what man should not have been.
The present is what man ought not to be.
The future is what artists are." - Edmond De Goncourt

"Talent can have an expiration date." - Michael Kimmelman

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will,
they soon become inevitable." - Christopher Reeve

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"So likewise in teaching others everything depends on consistency, for it is only through repetition that the pupil
makes the material his own." - I Ching: Hexagram 29 (K'an / The Abysmal - Water): the Image

"When you learn, teach; when you get, give." - Maya Angelou

"I practice; I learn; I live and breathe images." - Rebecca Rikleen

"What really separates human from ape is not the ability to talk incomplete sentnces.
It is our underused capacity to listen."
- The New York Times, Editorial: We Never Really Talk Anymore, 6 August 2007

"Absorbing art's effect and grasping its meaning starts partly by deciphering the how and what of its
physical particulars." - Roberta Smith

"I'm a teacher, I teach." - Robert Coane

"I’m the product of Classical Antiquity. What do I know?" - Robert Coane

"I want to make students aware that they come with a point of view, one that transforms
what is told them and one that is relative and changing, a point of departure." - Anthony Toney

"Before you can learn to walk on a tightrope, you must learn to walk on the ground." - Henri Matisse

"The formal class is a stimulating extension of my work as a painter." - Anthony Toney

"The academic disciplines of art history and studio art expose students to culturally important bodies
of knowledge, train them in skills of analysis and synthesis and teach them modes of professional conduct.
But there is a deeper way art educates: like literature, music and dance, it educates the imagination and,
in so doing, deepens and refines awareness of how inert physicality may be brought to life by human touch."
- Ken Johnson

"Ours is now an art world with a very imperfect memory of the cultural past." - Hilton Kramer

"Who were my masters? The people in the streets and piazzas of Rome." - Caravaggio

"Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees,
along the roads by observing the formation of the clouds, in the studio by studying the model."
- August Rodin

"Those who take for their guide anything other than nature, mistress of the masters,
exhaust themselves in vain." - Leonardo

"To observe nature and align oneself with it; what more could one teach?"
- Antoine-Louis Barye (Rodin's teacher)

"And genius was not something to be taught, only nurtured." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"It takes a long time to become a child." - Pablo Picasso

"The past is the basis for the future." - José Cisneros

"He made us use our powers of observation to the utmost, by accustoming us to seize upon
the essential points of everything. Often he sent us to Nature, but still more often to the Louvre,
where we had to make drawings, which in turn had to bew reproduced formmemory at the school."
- Alphonse Legros

"Now I have given you a compass by means of which, with nature as a professor,
you can steer yourself." - August Rodin

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ON CREATIVITY

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett

"In a world of infinite metamorphoses -- only a fraction of which we're privy to -- who can cleanly separate
the fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to? - Nicholas Christopher in The Beastiary

"Art isn't a contest. It's a conversation between artists, living and dead, and between artists and us,
too unruly to stick to the neat scripts historians devise for it." - Michael Kimmelman

“Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.” - Henri Poincaré

“You don’t see what you’re seeing until you see it but when you do see it, it lets you see many other things.”
- William Thurston

“Art is all tied up in time. Time is its subject and its substance. Art records time, measures it, manipulates it,
invents it. Art also exists in time, is composed of it, is swallowed up in it. The idea of timeless art is sweet.
But there is no "timeless." And the longer a piece of art outlives its time, the more clearly it speaks of ephemerality,
what is or will be gone.”- Holland Cotter

"I'm working on a painting, an abstract painting, very abstract. No paint, no canvas, I just think about it."
- Steven Wright

"If I'm painting and a clamer comes along and digs those big, dirty holes right in front of me,
I truly believe that what I'm doing is just a pastiche. I really am moved when I see that his is the artwork
and mine is just an impression. It always shocks me that these people come along and dig great holes
and walk away from it and it looks just wonderful." - John Walker

"It is important for the student to realize that there is a process involved [in creativity] whether explained
as revelation, intuition, observation or a synthesis." - Anthony Toney

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." - Anais Nin

"Art is an elegant expression of the collective unconscious." - Denis Achacoso

"Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature,--takes from nature, the selections which best
accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz. the mind and the
soul of man." - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth;
but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the
shows of color and the curves of grace." - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature,
whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature,
like himself, is but the effect." - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"It is well to remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman,
or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."
- Maurice Denis

"Como un pintor...que llevara un mundo a cuestas, y de pronto una persona, una frase, una imagen fugaz,
trazasen todo un cuadro en su cabeza." - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

"...art is no longer what the vulgar think it to be, that is, some sort of inspiration which comes from nowhere,
which proceeds by chance, and presents no more than the picturesque externals of things. It is reason itself,
adorned by genius, but following a necessary course and encompassed by higher laws."- Eugene Delacroix

"I cannot be pinned down here and now,
because I live as well with the dead
as with the unborn.
Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual,
And still not close enough." - Paul Klee, his own epitaph.

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
And I know of no substitution for the force and beauty of its process." - Henry James

"Art is more godlike than science. science discovers, art creates." - John Opie

"Unless the eye catch fire, God will not be seen.
Unless the ear catch fire, God will not be heard.
Unless the tongue catch fire, God wwill not be named.
Unless the heart catch fire, God will not be loved.
Unless the mind catch fire, God will not be known."
- William Blake

"You can make anything seem like anything. Picasso's a master at being able to make a face feel like a foot."
- Lucian Freud

"For a true concept of uniqueness you have to go to the artifacts of the past, to your Madonna,
for example. Human lives are expendable, Simon. Works of art are not."
- Barry Unsworth in Stone Virgin

"I make pictures." - Nikolai Klein

"It seems to be ordinary, what he's doing, but the extraordinary is everywhere." - Fairfield Porter on Vuillard

"What gives life to style is a certain disequilibrium." - Robert Hughes

"All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and success will always be
less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure." - Alberto Giacometti

"The true work of art is but a shadow of dvine perfection." - Michelangelo

I see something, find it marvelous and want to try and do it.
Whether it fails or whether it comes off, in the end becomes secondary." - Alberto Giacometti

"Take an object. Do something with it. Do something else with it." - Jasper Johns

"(Art is) the residue of vision." - Alberto Giacometti

"Art is the ape of nature."- Classical Dictum

“When you’re looking at the originals, you seem to be looking at copies; and when you’re looking at copies,
you seem to be looking at the originals. Is it a canal side in Haarlem or is it a Van der Heyden?... The maid-servants
in the streets seem to have stepped out of a Gerald Dow and appear equally well-adapted for stepping back again.”
- Henry James

“…the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially andhumanly, which is just as ardent as
their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” - Walter Benjamin

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space,
its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” - Walter Benjamin

"Visual art never begins with a poetic mood or idea, but with building one or several figures,
with harmonizing a few colors or tones, or with calculating spacial relationships.
Whether an idea then joins in is completely irrelevant..." - Paul Klee

"If there were no beginning to anything, there would be nothing to improve upon,
and the final outcome would not be and so wonderfully beautiful." - Giorgio Vasari

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
- Oscar Wilde

“...in anything I do, I don't want the viewer involved with how it was done - the curiosity about how it was
made can come later...I just want the work to be another thing in the room which is discovered slowly.”
- Robert Moskowitz

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." - George Bernard Shaw

"The painter's intellectual grasp and his technical skill can be combined to produce a masterpiece."
- Kenneth Clark

"What is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must follow? To do so is to doubt art,
which develops normally according to the laws of Nature, and must be exclussively occupied
in responding to human needs." - Dostoevsky

"Where mere technique controls the day, Art will always waste away."
- Friedrich Wieck (Clara Schumann's father)

"This isn’t art for art’s sake; it’s style for style’s sake—the distinction being a breathless deficit of substance."
- Mario Naves

"An artist who trades in trivialities should know well enough not to mess with themes that are beyond
the scope of his talent." - Mario Naves

"Some of the things that have made me want to paint, other than other paintings, are:
American wood and iron workof the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture;
the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain-stopre fronts and taxi-cabs; the music of Bach;
the poetry of Rimbeau [sic]; fast travel by train, auto and aerop[lanewhich brought new
and multiple perspectives; electric signs; the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.;
5 & 10cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano
and Negro jazz music in general, etc. In one way or another the quality of these things
plays a role in determining the character of my paintings." - Stuart Davis

"...you had to know things better to forget them, to forget their names, their styles of presentation.
And only by this means, this unnaming, could could the penetyration of Nature - things as they really are,
the silent mysteries beyond nomenclature - really begin... What he is best at painting is things seen for their
own sake, deriving their meaning from their being, not the other way around."
- Robert Hughes on Jean-Siméon Chardin

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ON DRAWING

"Whereas beautiful colors are sold in the art stores along the Rialto, drawing is only to be learned
from the box of talent." - Tintoretto

"Into his last years, he spent days drawing at his studio near the Place des Victoirsor or in the Louvre
or in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries." - Michael Kimmelman on Cartier-Bresson

"He had always carried a little sketch pad with him, consistent with his early training under Lhote.
Drawing had been his first passion. So with help from artist frieds like Sam Szafran and Avigdor Arikha in Paris,
he committed himself to drawingwith an enthusiasm that people around him found remarkable."
- Michael Kimmelman on Cartier-Bresson

"Drawing is a caress." - Robert Coane

"Drawing is a kind of universal language understood by all nations." - Benjamin Franklin

"Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools.
It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness." - Michael Kimmelman

"Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was
the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just like people played an instrument or sang if they wanted
to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue and the time and
effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability." - Michael Kimmelman

"Drawing promoted meditation and stillness." - Michael Kimmelman

"A sustained act of will is essential to drawing. Nothing could be more opposed to reverie, since the requisite
concentration must be continually diverting the natural course of physical movements, on its guard against
any seductive curve asserting itself." - Paul Valéry

"A good drawing is more than just a feat of hand-eye or mind-body co-ordination.
It is an exemplary struggle with society and culture; at best a victory over forces that, most of the time,
keep most of us from having the courage of our own originality." - Ken Johnson

"Nullus dies sine line." - "No day without drawing." - Adage

"One must always draw, draw with the eyes when one cannot draw with a pencil." - Balthus

"Make a drawing, begin it again, trace it, begin it again and retrace it." - Edgar Degas

"Don't draw bodies looking like a sacks of walnuts." - Leonardo Da Vinci

"...you must always keep drawing without interruption, both on holidays and on workdays.
In this way, through long habit,good practice becomes second nature." - Cennino Cennini

"Forget nothing; learn the trick of remembering through the hand.
- Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"Artists do not learn to draw only by recording pure, uncontaminated perceptions;
they also learn by imitating other artistsand then strive to make something distinctively individual
out of the generic templates that they internalize." - Ken Johnson

"Drawing is not form. It is the way we see form." - Edgar Degas

"Drawing was his way of making something his own..." - Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"But you must see my pictures in the other room, my sketches. They are my great works."
- August Rodin

"Drawing has been called the chamber music of the visual arts. Just as in a musical composition for a
piano trio, say, or a string quartet, we are better able to attend not only to the separate instruments
but to the individual notes than inj a symphonic work for full orchestra,so with a drawing on paper,
our concentration is more sharply focused on the lines and other marks and touches of the artist's hand
than with the "drawing" to be disccerned in a large oil painting on canvas." - Hilton Kramer

"Drawings place us in an intimate, almost conversational relation to the artist's sensibility. They give us
an initial profile of the artist's vision and, in certain cases, they may define the boundaries of the
expectations we bring to an artist's entire "oeuvre". - Hilton Kramer

"For anxiety, I look at drawings." - Jan Krugier

"I can't be myself without drawing, you see." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"Not only is the act of drawing incredibly absorbing and peaceful, but, every once in a while,
I'm really pleased with the result." - Mark Robertson

"The drawing should not be considsered as something to be done first and then colored.
In looking at nature we do not analyze the drawing and color separately.
It is one thing and a simultaneous impression." - Stewart Davis

"Each line of a drawing, besides contributing to the final image, stands as a unique record of the artist's thoughts
at the exact moment that the lin ewas brought into existence" - Robert Cottingham

"A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk." - Paul Klee

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ON PAINTING

"Painting is man's oldest conjuring trick." - Michael Kimmelman

"Today no hand-made art form has the near-universal currency that painting once did." - Ken Johnson

"I always try to paint like other people and I always end up painting like myself." - Willem de Kooning

"Painting is no problem; the problem is what to do when you're not painting." - Jackson Pollolck

"Painting is man's oldest conjuring trick." - Michael Kimmelman

"He traffics in all manner of newfangled and oddball devices, from unlikely fabrics as painting surfaces
to strange chemical brews in lieu of the usual pigments. Doing so, he somehow reaffirms the durability
of painting and, not incidentaly, invents strangely beautiful pictures, the emphasis equally on strange
and on beautiful." - Michael Kimmelman on Sigmar Polke

"I read what you wrote about Derain and I know you aren't going to like my painting." - Leland Bell

"I would like the intimacy of the image against a very stark background. I want to isolate the image."
- Francis Bacon

"What is painting but the art of expressing the visible by means of the invisible? It's made up. It is a product
entirely of the human mind. A mind has meditated to conceive it and minds must meditate to understand it."
- Katharine Weber

"Through painting, I unravel the labyrinths of my past experience with the images and psycholocical and
ideological concepts of my time. Paintings are resolved only to point to other problems, other necessities
and resolutions." - Anthony Toney

"The refined pleasures of the palate were one of many unorthodox ways we celebrated god" - Sarah Dunant

"Strive to make the picture a 'thing' by itself. It should be...simple and self reliant.... It should depend on
nothing outside itself for the comprehension of it by one capable of comprehension." - Stewart Davis

"The chain of paintings becomes a visual record of my interpretations of reality, so I say that my paintings
are a kind of realism." - Anthony Toney

"Is the subject of a picture of any significance? No -- since all visual objects have form and reflect light,
it is possible to observe the phenomena of lighted form in space in any object." - Stewart Davis

“Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.” - Wassily Kandinsky

"The riddle lies in the flow of colors. They flame up like fiery creatures, and yet serve the design,
which can be examined as minutely as a miniature. The rich sound of the dominant chords conquers one
before there is time to examine any detail. A Veronese blue, a strawberry pink, full of sweetness of Venice
in all its tones down to the deepest claret, a yellow of golden orange to the faintest color of lemons.
A green is mixed with it like half-ripe lemons. These colors are placed there, lie there, swim next to each other,
above each other, contained by no contour. And as one approaches more closely, one sees heads, hands, breasts,
which one is tempted to look at under a magnifying glass...." - Julius Meier-Graefe

“Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.” - Wassily Kandinsky

"For me a form is never something abstract. It is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird or
something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake." - Joan Miró

"What in a curious way one is always trying to do is to paint the one picture
that will annihilate al the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting." - Francis Bacon

"My process of making a work begins by thinking over these psychological, visual, and societal contrasts
in order to generalize and to invent a particular pictorial presentation. Memory, conscious and unconscious,
of course, plays a role. Within the web of memory, one is confronted with major and minor problems of
contradiction that need to be resolved. When I feel that a particular problem has been clarified in my mind,
I am ready to make a painting." - Anthony Toney

"The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane.''
- Leonardo da Vinci

"If you paint a man leaning over, your own back must hurt.' - Andrew Wyeth

"Unless your picture goes wrong it will be no good." - Picasso

"The more complex paintings contain interweavings, web upon web of viual and psychological contradictions.
The simpler ones stress shape and pattern and combinations of intense colors." - Anthony Toney

"Now this is a picture! All the others are playing cards." - Caravaggio

"Sculpture is what one bumps into when stepping back to get a better look at a painting."
- Clement Greenberg

"There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain
arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting.
- Édouard Vuillard

"...there was no ultimate painting, just the one he happened to do last, whichever it may have been."
- David Sweetman re Gauguin

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ON PHOTOGRAPHY

"...a marvelous profession, while it remains a modest one." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"Photography is an instantaneous operation, both sensory and intellectual --- an expression of the world
in visual terms, and also a perpetual quest and interrogation. It is at one and the same time the recognition
of a fact in a fractionm of a second and the regorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived which
give to that fact expression and significance." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"...the simultaneous recognitionin a fraction of a second of an event, as well as the precise organization
of forms that give that event its proper expression." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"I'm not interested in my photographs nor other people's." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"I adore shooting photographs. It's like being a hunter. But some hunters are vegetarians - which is my
relationship to photography." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"...approach tenderly, gentlt...on tiptoe - even even if the subject is a still life." A velvet hand, ahawk's eye -
these we we should all have." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation
that was unrolling before my eyes." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"There is something appauling about photographing people. It is certainly some sort of violation so,
if sensitivity is lacking, there can be something barbaric about it." - Henri Cartier Bresson

[The automatic camera] "is like shooting partridges with a machine gun." - Henri Cartier Bresson

"Photography was my choice of weapons." - Gordon Parks

"I love flesh. I am a photographer of the skin." - Bettina Rheims

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ON RELATED DISCIPLINES

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.” – Joseph Brodsky

"For better or worse, photography, film, video and digital technologies are the means by which our society
talks to itself." - Ken Johnson

"While it is in the nature of a film industry to support war efforts, to be patriotic, to distinguish heroes from villains,
it is in the nature of art to see that everyone has his reasons." - David Thomson

"In truth we have never cared too much whether Hollywood films are good;we only want them to sell,
and we are not famous for our sense of taste." - David Thomson

"He often described drawing as a meditative experience, photography as intuitive, but added that
'there is no esthetic peculiar to photography or drawing.' " - Michael Kimmelman re Cartier-Bresson

"I would like to write the way I do my paintings, that is as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates,
and I come up with a title long afterward." - Paul Gauguin

"Baseball is an art." - Mark Robertson

"Sometimes I think that the heavens have opened up and what has come down is color,
sound and music. That is what painting is all about." - Hans Hoffman

"A painter can learn color from a Beethoven symphony." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"One can make a poem simply by aranging colors in the same way that one can also say something
comforting in music." - Vincent Van Gogh

"A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled,
enticements, variety, patterning and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely."
- Margaret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner

"Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous
pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving,
or music." - Julia Child

"The chef, or cook, proportions, assembles, and prepares various products of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms,
creating food for the epicure. The aesthetic pleasure induced by food can be so closely related to that produced by certain
music and other arts, as to defy separation or separate identification." - Merle Armitage in Fit For A King

"Once, however, Vincent wanted to make a soup. How he mixed it, I don't know; as he mixed his colours in his pictures....
We couldn't eat it." - Paul Gauguin

"Madness is to Art what garlic is to salads." - Augustus Saint-Gaudens

“The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure.” - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"There is no art without a poetic aim." - Édouard Vuillard

"People call me a painter of dancers but I really wish to capture movement itself." - Edgar Degas

"Drawing has been called the chamber music of the visual arts. Just as in a musical composition for a
piano trio, say, or a string quartet, we are better able to attend not only to the separate instruments
but to the individual notes than inj a symphonic work for full orchestra,so with a drawing on paper,
our concentration is more sharply focused on the lines and other marks and touches of the artist's hand
than with the "drawing" to be disccerned in a large oil painting on canvas." - Hilton Kramer

"Drawing and dancing are branches of the same tree. Of course, they are just two varieties
of the same impulse." - Sergei Eisenstein

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ON STYLES, CHOICES AND PREFERENCES

"Bonnard could not have known that young artists in the year 2006 would operatein a commonplace world of budget air travel,
proliferating art fairsand museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter endless objects once and mostly
never again. This...may be the biggest change in art during the last half century or so: that more and more artists make works
they never expect to be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums,
designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice. Culture slides into the realm of
entertainment." - Michael Kimmelman

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy,
bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf." - Baruch Spinoza

"I'm seeking the high seas rather than safe harbour. If I sink, you're excused from mourning me." - Gustave Flaubert

"Let every man exercise the art he knows." - Aristophanes

"Of the many mixed blessings of modern culture, art's absorption into academe is high among them,
along with the influx of money, a flood of it lately spreading not only prosperity but also the corrupting aspirations
of popular entertainment." - Michael Kimmelman

"Different approaches in painting or art generally are manifestations of different views of reality."
- Anthony Toney

"A work of art should be decorative, above all." - Henri Matisse

"A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions." - Rembrandt

"For Caravaggio, light was a divine power and theatrical agent, cast onto players acting on a darkened stage;
for Rembrandt, it's a mysterious force emerging as if from inside his subjects." - Michael Kimmelman

"It is important that you find where your heart lies because your art will surely follow."
- Hereward Lester Cooke

"Abstraction is the expression in symbols of actual experience." - Anthony Toney

"I would love to have a structure as powerful and human and deeply probing as Mondrian's, but I also have to
invent something that will accomodate the appearance of things." - Leland Bell

"This is an invariable rule of art history: only when a painter is painting what appeals to him,
in a way that appeals to him, is there a chance of producing a worthwhile picture. - Hereward Lester Cooke

"The question in art is not between representation and non-representation, but rather what is being represented.
This in turn determines the how and the why." - Anthony Toney

"You will never be able to alter your instinctive preferences, because they originate deep down
in the recesses of your mind and memories..." - Hereward Lester Cooke

“I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self.
Why was that so very difficult?” - Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade

"Abstraction can be a path to or away from that reality." - Anthony Toney

"It is fatal for you as an artist to force yourself to paint either a subject or in a style which does not come
naturally to you." - Hereward Lester Cooke

"I paint self portraits because I am alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo

"Have the courage of your convictions and paint what and how you like." - Hereward Lester Cooke

"...her art refusing, like all art, to conform to the clichés and predisposed interpretations of ideologues."
- Michael Kimmelman

"If you climb onto a bandwagon, you will always be painting second hand and, probably,
second rate pictures." - Hereward Lester Cooke

"There is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk free than rebellion,
nothing more conservative than youth culture." - David Brooks

"But I must warn you: don't try to fake the modern manner if it isn't right for you. Find your legend.
Find your myth." - Robertson Davies in What's Bred in the Bone

"Form and subject are one. If form predominates...there is a loss of vitality and of that humanity
that should underlie even the most idealized construction; but if the subject predominates,
the mind release its hold. In both cases the chance of a masterpiece is deminished." - Kenneth Clark

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ON VIOLENCE AND LIFE

"The next morning I made myself go to the studio and work because, however futile it might be,
it's what I do, and all I can do." - Elizabeth Murray, "Clinging to Belief in Art", New York Times, 23 September 2001

"There is nothing more American than brutal violence. The country was built on it, revels in it and shows every
evidence of clinging to it with the crazed, destructive strength of an obsessive lover." - Bob Herbert

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren
about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom
he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' - with his mouth." ~ Mark Twain

"Everything degenerates in the hands of man." - Jean Jacques Rousseau

"The human race had yet to render itself extinct; perhaps the animals were just adry run. Once you believed
animals were insensate things, disposable, of utilitarian vale only, it wasn't hard to move on to people."
- Nicholas Christopher in The Beastiary

"But we should be outraged at what's going on in the world. Anger is not negative. Why shouldn't I be outraged?
Why shouldn't I be bitter and angry?" - Julie Nicholson

"I don't like to see people suffer but, then, they breed at such a rate that they're bound to suffer." - Francis Bacon

"There is no correlation between aid and growth." - David Brooks

"My feeling in my heart a sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor. And artists who create works
of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor." - Wallace Shawn in "Fever"

"You set out to be happy, prosperous, successful, content. But in time, lots of time, all your intentions fade away
and you become vastly closer to death than you ever were to life."
- New York Times Editorial, Death the Supercentenarian, Tuesday, 29 August 2006

"The only world that won't disappoint me is the one I make up." - Francis Bacon

“Always trust a stranger. In this life, it’s the people you know who let you down.” - Andrew O’Hagan

"The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear -- fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.
What he wants above everything else is safety." - H.L. Mencken

"For a young bourgeois with Surrealist ideas, breaking stone and working in a cement factory was a very good lesson."
- Henri Cartier Bresson

“Young people haven’t accomplished much yet so they can only elevate themselves by endlessly celebrating
their own superior sensibilities.” - David Brooks

"Action has always revolted me. But when I have had to, or chosen to, I have acted decisively, quickly and well."
- Gutave Flaubert

"Artists will certainly never win over warriors, but their existtence gives us hope." - Grace Glueck

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord wouldfully suffice.
This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality...
how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds
than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing
but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein

"If you don't have a dog -- at least one -- there is not necessarily anything wrong with you,
but there may be something wrong with your life." - Vincent van Gogh

"My works, those dispersed and those remaining in my studio, record my struggle for awareness and
convictions in a world full of contradictions and violence." - Anthony Toney

"...I have been fighting for two months and I can now gauge the intensity of life." - Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
in "Written from the Trenches"

"Though I participated in two wars, never have I felt that the world is as close to disaster as it is now -
for the misuse of nuclear energy can destroy the world." - Anthony Toney

"[the war is a] paltry mechanism, which serves as a purge to over-numerous humanity.
This war is a great remedy. In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride.
It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant unit, whose economic activities
become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us. My views on sculpture remain absolutely the same.
It is the vortex of will, of decision, that begins." - Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in Written from the Trenches

"The concept of death is explicit or implicit in all my photographs." - Manuel Álvarez Bravo

"In his work, a messy, violent, adversarial world is given order through art."
- Holland Cotter re Ni Zan (1306-1374)

"What was art was outlawed." - Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

"The paintings burn, the artists are buried, and a few more years living like a vegetable,
as though I had never exhisted as a painter." - Emile Nolde

"If you give up the struggle, you give up what it's all about." - Robert Moskowitz

"I've never felt more generous, nor more selfish; rarely more creative, rarely more indifferent."
- Denis Achacoso

"All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time."
- Simone Weil

"To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped."
- Thomas Hardy

"I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin." - William Butler Yeats

"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways,
totally worn out, shouting '...holy shit...what a ride!'" - Anonymous

"I want my paintings to inspire a sense of optimism in the face of the seriousness of the human predicament."
- Anthony Toney

"I suffered two great accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down....
The other accident was Diego." - Frieda Kahlo

"El sueño de la razon produce monstruos." - Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." - Truman Capote

"Anger I reserve for people, commonly referred to as 'humans'." - Robert Coane

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
- Baruch Spinoza

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow

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ON THE FIGURE

"The nude alone is well dressed" - August Rodin

"Naked I came out of my mother's womb and naked I shall return thither." - Job 1:21

"Art can never exist without Naked Beauty display'd." - William Blake

"No beauty does she lack when all her clothes are on but beauty itself she is
when all her clothes are gone." - Hindu Proverb

"Oil paint was made for depicting flesh." - Willem de Kooning

"My nudes are done, which is to say that the bodies benerath the draperies are done...
You see, it is the part one doesn't see, the most important part, which is finished." - August Rodin

"I'm in the habit of sculpting my marble children first without clothes...
Later I only have to throw a cloth over them and everything vibrates at the points
where it touches the body; thus the figure is made of flesh and blood, not a cold effigy."
- August Rodin

"Throughout the history of Western art, the human body has been the touchstone
of an artist's drawing ability. It is the most difficult subject he can hope to interpret and,
if he can draw a good nude, he can draw anything." - Hereward Lester Cooke

"I don't like a long study of casts, even of the sculptors of the best Greek period.
At best, they are only imitations,and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life
as an imitation of nature itself." - Thomas Eakins
 
"The Greeks did not study the antique: the Theseus and Illyssus, and the draped figures
in the Parthenon pediment were modeled from life, undoubtedly. And nature is just as varied
and just as beautiful in our day as she was in the time of Phidias." - Thomas Eakins

"The most captivating and imaginative painter to have lived since Giotto would certainly have been
Paolo Ucello, if only he had spent as much time on human figures and animals as he spent,
and wasted, on the finer points of perspective." - Giorgio Vasari

"What interestes me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.
It is through the figure that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life."
- Henri Matisse

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"I have a very simple taste, the best is just good enough!" - Oscar Wilde

"The public glances at the art and then stampedes to the giftshop anyway. Well, what can I say?
It's the same public that has come to accept sex with condoms. - Katharine Weber

"The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals."
- H.L.Mencken

"Quality is not something you believe in. Quality is something you experience.” - Robert M. Pirsig

"Nature is much too green and poorly designed." - Françoise Boucher

"Illusionsm at this level makes criticism silly and prompts a certain knee-jerk melancholy for bygone eras
of unearthly draftsmanship." - Michael Kimmelman

"...two of the characteristics of a masterpiece: a confluence of memories and emotions
from a single idea, and a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive
of the artist's own eppoch and yet keep a relationship with the past." - Kenneth Clark

"...that double relationship which is the prerogative of the masterpiece.
It is a superb piece of design and a profound assertion of human values." - Kenneth Clark

"If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting, it should be burned for it must be bad."
- George Brenard Shaw

"Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding." - Queen Marie of Romania

"Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting,
the fact is that this hapens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if, once in a
while, popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account."
- Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco

"There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character...only the false,
the artificial is ugly in art." - August Rodin

"It is one thing to die individually or to be wiped out en masse.
It is another an far more grievous thing entirely to be forced to live in a time of squalid art."
- J. D. Landis in Longing

"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.
When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." - Oscar Wilde

"I just can't seem to paint nice things." - Ivan Albright

"The more stupid it is, the more people want it." - Daniel C. Dugan

"Idiots love angles." - Daniel C. Dugan

"Less is more." - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"The secret is knowing what to leave out." - Steve Jobs

"If we are willing to dispense a painter from giving his works the quality of beauty,
any man can become a painter,for nothing is easier than to produce ugliness." - Giacomo Casanova

"That a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit
than the fact that it's about mermaids and palm trees." - Robert Hughes

"Like sport, art is an area in which elitism can display itself at a negligible cost in social harm."
- Robert Hughes

"But since when are the arts a democracy? Perhaps the only justifiable aristocracy on earth
is that of the talented." - Dick Cavett

"So art has become foolishly confounded with education -- that all should be equally qualified."
- James McNeill Whistler

"The great mystery facing mankind was not why all fashionable stuff was wretched
but why so much wretched stuff was fashionable." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"Artistic standards were abandoned, the comfortable cult of the mediocre prevailed,
and presentation became confused with substance." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"In its most significant aspects, contemporary art is ugly...
a threat to the ordering of society and man's concept of himself." - Leon Golub

"Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
- Al Capp

"Separate the abilities from the disabilities. Let's see what works." - Isaac Perlman

"Intellectually, ours has in many respects become a self-lobotomized society in which
the moral fatuities of pop culture are quickly made to fill the gaps left vacant by our widespread
incomprehnsion of the historical past." - Hilton Kramer

"It's all part of the avalanche of sub-intellectual trash that nowadays passes for art in the museums
under the banner of Conceptual Art, which, by its very nature, is wholly devoid of aesthetic interest."
- Hilton Kramer

"(Diego) Rivera probably gave more to Mexico, in terms of self-knowledge and cultural pride,
than any artist in its history, but he was only able to do it because he had absorbed and completely
internalized the great tradition of Renaissance fresco painting which, combined with his absorption
of French modernism, pre-Colombian Mexican art and living folk-art to produce the tremendous
results we see on the walls of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. If you had told Rivera
that quality didn't matter, he would have laughed in your face." - Robert Hughes

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ON CHANCE

"Just as there are many who are helped by Fortune and are not endowed with much talent,
so on the contrary there are countless talented men who are persecuted by hostile and contrary Fortune.
Thus it is an open secret that her children are those who are not helped by talent but depend on her;
for she likes to raise by her favor some who would never win recognition through their own merits."
- Giorgio Vasari

"Easy or automatic solutions rarely embody discoveries, but rather stem from well worn habit patterns.
Learn to welcome accidents or obstacles and even failure as means toward discovery." - Anthony Toney

"One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard
in order to benefit others and make his own name and then be prevented by sickness,
or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun."
- Giorgio Vasari on Piero della Francesca

"I think the rarest thing now when I go to places is to be surprised." - Derry Moore

"I feel that anything I've ever liked at all has been the result of an accident on which
I've been able to work." - Francis Bacon

"The accidents which are most fruitful tend to happen at the time of greatest despair about
how to go on with a painting." - Francis Bacon

"If anything ever does work in my case, it works from that moment when consciously
I don't know what I'm doing." - Francis Bacon

"I go from this to that, and why be ashamed of it? It seems to me that this is the human experience."
- Larry Rivers

"Art happens." - James McNeill Whistler

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"He came from nothing to something by doing nothing." - Maureen Dowd

"All art is necesarily an abstraction. But if a work is to be socially constructive or individually significant,
it must stem from and return to substantial experience." - Anthony Toney

"There are artists...who are as much the authors of their millieux as of their work.
To visit (the) studio he occupies...is not in itself an 'aesthetic' experience, but its peculiar qualities
reveal something crucial about the psychic image and the sense of human possibility
which will also be found in the art which is made there." - Hilton Kramer

"I am never alone." - Henri Matisse in old age refering to the images in his studio.

"There is no such thing as inspiration, only regular work." - Francis Bacon

"Go on working freely and furiously and you will mmake progress." - Paul Gauguin

"Here in the studio, I work on half a dozen paintings and I am drawing and thinking about my course,
everything together. For it has to go together. Otherwise, it wouldn't work at all." - Paul Klee

"...walls were always covered with an erndless array of poetry and light." - Mark Rothko

"Work, work, whether you want to or not. I throw away a whole day's work sometimes,
but the simple effort of turning it out has kept my steam up and kept me from lagging."
- David Graham Phillips

"Shut up and paint." - Robert Coane

"The smalest thing, werll done, becomes artistic." - William Matthews

"If you want to penetrate the mind of an artist, you must visit him in his studio." - Robert Schumann

"I never took up smoking - I think because I wanted to avoid being distracted for so much as a minute."
- August Rodin

"He turned night into day and with tremendous fervor spent all his time on the study of his profession.
He made a habit of this, his only pleasure was always to work hard on his craft and always to be painting."
- Giorgio Vasari on Perugino

"Live by working." - August Rodin

"He rises at seven, enters his atelier at eight, and interrupts his work only for lunch,
then continues until nightfall, working on his feet or perched on a stool, which leaves him totally worn
out at night, and ready for bed after an hour of sleeping." - Jules de Goncourt on Rodin

"A woman artist is not deprived by cooking or having children...one is in fact nourished
by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day, even a single half hour,
so that the images grow in one's mind." - Barbara Hepworth

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ON THE BUSINESS OF ART

"Lucky as I am, I've been able to hang on to most of my work." - Douglas Vogel

"All I am asking is that you look at my work. Tell me what you think, without lying." - Sarah Dunant

"Art promises an experience out of the ordinary but, with exhibitions commonplace and galleries selling fun
and games and almost any crazy old thing for millions, it is easy to feel spoiled or to mistake shock for awe."
- Michael Kimmelman

"The Art market operates according to its own logic, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the art.
Value is not price -- whether the issue is a Klimt, or a ball player, or a chief executive paid millions of dollars,
who runs his company into the ground." - Michael Kimmelman

"It's only natural to play the skepticwhen the artworld is a circus of profligacy, drunk with cash,
and when dimwitted speculators make headlines, wasting fortunes on bad art." - Michael Kimmelman

"Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture -- even the artists and rock stars are bourgeous strivers."
- David Brooks

"Many would prefer to keep their money in art rather than in stocks and bonds." - Richard Feigen

"Art is a potent social tool. Almost magically, ownership bestows status, turns nobodies into somebodies
and makes those somebodies look classy and smart or, at the very least, rich. Yes, art is about ideals and
beauty and all that. But it is also about the power of possession, the sovereignity of taste. Deep down, it appeals
to the royalist in us all ...art becomes what it may always really be:not the potentially transformative vision
of romantic lore, but an emblem of preciousness; a badge of attainment; a collectible to have, hold and marvel at;
an enviable jewel in a fortunate somebody's crown." - Holland Cotter

"The whole art is to write and write and writeand then offer iut for sale, just like butter." - Hilaire Belloc

"Poor artist! You have put a fragment of your soul into this canvas which you have come to sell."
- Paul Gauguin re Van Gogh

"Never was there such a load of rubbish talked about anything as has been, and will be, talked about art.
The nonsense, really, is that paintings should be priced the way they are, that a Van Gogh can go for,
what is it, $75 million? That's disgusting." - John Myatt

"The hardest part of a painting is getting the money for it, which never gets any easier no matter how
many pictures you make." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"...princely patrons are best, because they are not cheap." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"Also, always try to get an advance, even from princes." - Judith Merkle Riley in The Serpent Garden

"It's not money I'm after, it's something else. When I've found it, I'll have the money."- August Rodin

"The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself."
- Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton

"I don't paint for a living. That's how I live." - Willem de Kooning

"The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist." - Ad Reinhardt

"What is it with mothers? A genius emerged from the womb, and the mother feared
he would suffer more from lack of funds than from the stifling of his art." - J. D. Landis in Longing

"The game is not about worldly success. The real game is between oneself and the canvas,
to end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with."
- Robert Motherwell

"He knew something about funny ways of getting a living. It was precisely from a life devoted
to such shabby expedients that he fled here from London, built up a business, became established.
It was to funny ways of getting a living that failure here would doom him to return...
Just when he was beginning to feel some confidence in his status as craftsman and businessman."
- Barry Unsworth

"You have to use your human capital judiciously." - Orlando Plaza

"People always say congratulations. When you're a successful bidder it means you're willing to spend more
money than anyone else. I'm not sure if that's congratulations or condolences." - Eli Broad

"A child...One has to be, to think that an artist is something useful." - Paul Gauguin

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ON RELIGION

"Thank God I'm an atheist!" - Diego Rivera

"Es posible que Dios exista, pero eso, a estas alturas de la historia, con todo lo que hemos pasado,
¿tiene alguna importancia?" - Mario Vargas Llosa

"My mother used to say that in our land there were enough gods for women to have at least one on their side,
while your religion has three in one and they are all men. Even the bird." - Sarah Dunant

" 'I grew up inanother language, under another sun,' she said, 'I believe what I need to believe to get by.' "
- Sarah Dunant

"If you wish to aspire to peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be the disciple of the Truth,
then search." - Friedrich Nietzsche

“After coming into contact with a religious man, I always feel I must wash my hands.”- Friedrich Nietzsche

"[God] hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine." - C.S. Lewis

"The sun is God." - J.M.W. Turner

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory
that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." - H.L. Mencken

"I have no family, no god and no country. I am a free man." - Robert Coane

"I distrust both patriotism and religion and despise the arrogance of piety." – Robert Coane

"ART is my god and my religion, my studio is my temple, my pictures are my icons,
the masters are my saints, the model stand is my altar, my models are my priests,
my painting and my drawing are my prayer, and them and then and there I worship.
I am very religious!" - Robert Coane

"Megachurches are presided over by the same skeevy door-to-door bible salesmen that we've always had,
just in an age of better technology. But they're selling the same thing: fear. Fear to keep you in line."
- Bill Maher

"You are born, you die and that's it." - Francis Bacon

 

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