To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.
- Ben Shahn
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
- Georgia O’Keeffe
It’s really absurd to make… a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it… But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
- Willem de Kooning
Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction.
- Camille Paglia
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
- Albert Einstein
The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.
- Salvador Dali
It’s easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.
- Edgar Degas
I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.
- Roy Lichtenstein
Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting.
Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.
- Georges Braque
Nature, my dear sir, is only a hypothesis.
- Raoul Dufy
Beware of artists- They mix with all classes of society and are therfore most dangerous.
- Queen Victoria
In art it’s not the thinking that does the job, but making.
- Goethe
If one criticizes painting by it’s verisimilitude, one’s understanding is similar to that of a child.
- Su Tung P’o
A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved.
- Auguste Renoir
Sir, when the backsides look good enough to slap, there’s nothing more to do.
- Peter Paul Rubens
Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the singing of birds? People love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting- that they MUST understand.
- Pablo Picasso
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
- John Singer Sargent
The most useful thing about art is it’s uselessness.
- Tom Robbins
Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.
- Zippy the Pinhead
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. ther comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition if you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.
- Albert Einstein
Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule are completely mistaken.
- Pablo Picasso
If you could say it in words there’d be no reason to paint.
- Edward Hopper
I passionately hate the idea of being “with it”. I think an artist is always out of step with his time. he has to be.
- Orson Welles
I have walked the earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.
- Vincent Van Gogh
The artist must say it without saying it.
- Duke Ellington
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
- Michelangelo
I paint in order not to cry.
- Paul Klee
Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
- Claude Monet
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
- Leonardo da Vinci
In an artist’s life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
- Vincent Van Gogh
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
- Salvador Dali
Never put more than two waves in a picture; it’s fussy.
- Winslow Homer
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
- Michelangelo
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
- Rene Magritte
I hate flowers- I paint them because they are cheaper than models and they don’t move.
- Georgia O’Keeffe
Everything that you paint may be used as evidence against you.
- Pierre Alechinsky
Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
- Hans Hofmann
I don’t have big anxieties. I wish I did. I’d be much more interesting.
- Roy Lichtenstein
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
- Pablo Picasso
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
- Emile Zola
Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
- Pablo Picasso
Most art critics are failed artists, but so are most artists.
- Bob Kessel
You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
- Yogi Berra
If a man ain’t nothin’ else, then he’s an artist. It’s the only thing he can claim to be that nobody can prove he ain’t.
- Will Rogers
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
- Hans Hofmann
Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.
- Marc Chagall
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
- Saul Bellow
