Art Quotes

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.

The synthesis of art and technology has now been going on for so long. You can watch a film with incredible CGI where King Kong kills a thing and it doesn't even move you because you take everything for granted.

At art school, a teacher said: 'The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.' I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called 'Ice Cream and Wafers.' The next was 'Holding Back the Years.'

There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

I think art is inherently nonviolent and it actually occupies your mind with creation rather than destruction.

If we really are saying that rap is an art form, then we got to be more responsible for our lyrics. If you see everybody dying because of what you are saying, it don't matter that you didn't make them die. It just matters that you didn't save them.

People who paint, including myself, get to a point where a bit of angst comes in. If you're doing it for a living, it's worth it to suffer those slings and arrows.