I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.
Since Romanticism, art and the study of art have become vehicles for exploring the west's repressed emotional life, though one would not know it from half the deadening scholarship that has sprung up around them. Particularly in modern times, when art has been shoved to the periphery of culture, is it evident that art is aggressive and compulsive. The artist makes art not to save humankind but to save himself.
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.
Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets.
Its hard to find the light when your born in the dark
Each man's lifework is also a work in a series extending beyond him in either or both directions . . . To the usual coordinates fixing the individual's position -- his temperament and his training -- there is also the moment of his entrance, this being the moment in the tradition -- early, middle, or late -- with which his biological opportunity coincides. Of course, one person can and does shift traditions, especially in the modern world, in order to find a better entrance. Without a good entrance, he is in danger of wasting his time as a copyist regardless of temperament and training. . . . [Climactic entrances] occur at moments when the combinations and permutations of a game are all in evidence to the artist; at a moment when enough of the game has been played for him to behold its full potential; at a moment before he is constrained by the exhaustion of the possibilities of the game to adopt any of its extreme terminal positions. . . . By this view, the great differences between artists are not so much those of talent as of entrance and position in sequence. . . . [And] of course many other conditions must reinforce talent: physical energy, durable health, powers of concentration, are a few of the gifts of fortune with which the artist is best endowed.
Each great branch of art calls upon a different temperament. Painting and poetry more than all others invite the solitary nature. . . . Probably all important artists belong to this functionally lonely class. Only occasionally does the artist appear as a rebel, as in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. More commonly he has been a courtier, a part of the household of the prince, and entertainer, whose work was valued like that of any other entertainer, and whose function was to amuse more than to disquiet the audience. Today the artist is neither a rebel nor an entertainer. To be a rebel requires more effort away from his work than the artist wants to make. The entertainers have formed professional guilds in those many categories of public amusement from which the artist is now almost completely excluded. Only the playwright still functions both as an artist and as an entertainer. More lonely than ever, the artist today is like Dedalus, the strange artificer of wonderful and frightening surprises for his immediate circle.
I had placed my stick on the table, as I do every evening. It had been specially made to suit my height, to enable me to walk without too much difficulty. As I was standing up, a customer called to me: 'Monsieur, don't forget your pencil.' It was very unkind, but most funny.
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.
An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himeself with his art
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of the pain we all have.
I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
A Good artist has less time than ideas.
It is terrible and unbearable to an artist to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing, his second best. Throughout the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!
Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
But that's what being an artist is -- feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy.
What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.
From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. "The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. "The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. "But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown--a mountebank. "I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
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