Art Quotes

The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.

Every garden presents innumerable fascinating problems.

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of painting.

Painting a picture is like trying to fight a battle.

Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts .... We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box.

Armed with a paint-box, one cannot be bored, one cannot be left at a loose end, one cannot 'have several days on one's hands.

Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life's journey.

I do not presume to explain how to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.

Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument... It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.

Painting is complete as a distraction. I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body more entirely absorbs the mind.

Once you take yourself too seriously the art will suffer.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

There is some art that says the same thing to everybody. WE need something like that. What that is, I don't know. But virtual reality may be the key to it.

If you're still making art in your 30s you're either wadded or good - and I'm both.

The erosion of funding for seed and grassroots spaces is part of a wider liberal tendency to strip away the socially democratic infrastructure that actually makes art possible.

What's left is a cultural economy where only the privileged can afford to create, and where only immediately profitable art survives.

The Seed Sounds Weekender is a vital reminder that music doesn't start in boardrooms or big arenas; it starts in back rooms, pubs, basements, and independent spaces run on love, grit, and belief in something bigger.