Portal:Art/Quote archive

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Art

Former quotes at Art Wikiportal

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.
:-Franklin Delano Roosevelt A good rough test [of a work of art] is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life.

— Bernard Berenson

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

— Francis Bacon

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

— Eric Gill

Good painters imitate nature; bad ones spew it up.

— Miguel de Cervantes

The people who call my work 'abstract' are imbeciles; that which they call 'abstract' is the purest realism, whose reality is not represented by exterior form but by the idea behind it, the essence of the work.

— Constantin Brancusi

If only people knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures.

— Sir Edwin Landseer

Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?

— Marcel Duchamp to Constantin Brancusi at a 1912 exhibition of aviation technology.

I hate flowers — I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

— Georgia O'Keeffe

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

— Edgar Degas

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

— Edward Hopper

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

— Louise Bourgeois

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

— Jean Cocteau

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1897)

A painting is never finished. It simply stops in an interesting place.

— Paul Gardener

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

— Robert Motherwell

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

— Vincent Van Gogh

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

— Marc Chagall

Art is the triumph over chaos.

— John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever]]

Art doesn't die, it just changes tables. Like a hostess in a dancing club, art moves from one society formation to another. Yesterday and still largely today, Art sits with the Academics. Tomorrow will be dancing with Artificial web entities and kids who draw flash animations.

— Miltos Manetas, [[ Interview by Daisuke Nishimura for TOKION magazine,

(2005)

Art is an international language, that has no boundaries...

— Leonè Tonkinson, The Art Master

"For me painting is a means through which I find expression of life's joy and fulfillment, and I believe art, more than merely being a means of expression itself, also serves as a medium to help us to make peace with our lives through positive and enthusiastic sentiments and regard for the brighter aspects of our existence, escaping from protest, cynicism and selfishness.".

— Patricia Govezensky