art

Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment.

If you__e going to be an artist, you__e got to make your work your best friend, that you can go to whatever you__e feeling, and have a conversation with it.

We tend to think that what matters is decided by society or culture or religion or our peers, but no one can say what truly matters except us.

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn__ remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.

If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.

It's about what I know is true. Because I'm looking at this bright red storm of color on a canvas, at all my delicate lines and passionate brushstrokes. I'm looking at something so urgent and true, so far beyond what I thought I was capable of making.

The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.)"The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136.

No art is harder to master than believing in yourself.

These poems are cupsthat I pour my life into.Here, Drink!

It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.

I head in the direction of the Eiffel Tower when I exit the alley, relieved to be out of the dark.

As I said before, I took to miniature painting without a completely whole heart, on the advice of my elders and betters. Generally speaking, I do not think that one should ever take another person's advice in the things of life that really matter, but follow the dictates of the still small something in one's innermost self. But 'they' advised, and I bowed to the advice; and in this particular instance it was a good thing I did, because the advice turned out to be so resoundingly wrong that it turned me into another direction altogether. If I had gone on working in oils I might very well have been a dedicated but unsuccessful painter to this day.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

When you find your passion, turn a deaf ear to the naysayers and follow your dreams.

[W]e have reason to ask what artists are working specially for children, and whether they are running with the popular tide or saying something special.... In America, we had the 'parlor gift book' makers, but we also had Howard Pyle.

When an image depends on the next for a complete meaning, it moves the story and audience along without choking them with pathos

Our art is never really ours. Each person who experiences it brings to it a piece of themselves and reacts to it in ways that stem from their personal struggles, beliefs, morals, and even hang-ups.