Art Quote of the Day (below)

After my 2022 “second retirement”, I wanted to resurrect my art career (which atrophied when my military career took off), so I took art classes at Helena College as a way to quickly spin back up. I wrote an “Art Quote of the Day” on the whiteboard every class day… including a few of my own. I thought I’d continue here (though probably not posting daily). Disclaimers: I’m posting quotes I find interesting, but that doesn’t mean I AGREE with all of them…. also, I’ve added explanatory notes or context to a few.

Tip: if you’re looking for quotes on a particular subject or by a particular person (such as ‘watercolor’ or ‘composition’ or ‘Picasso’), try “find on page” in your browser… and while you’re here, be sure to check out my art and my blog on the other pages…

Art quote of the day:

3/28/2025: “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!” — François Auguste René Rodin

3/27/2025: “Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.” — Willem de Kooning

3/26/2025: “The good watercolors take a lifetime - plus a half an hour.” — Toni Onley

3/25/2025: “After a few thousand watercolors you will find that you have fallen in love with paper and paint.” — Rex Brandt

3/24/2025: “People like to think the creative process is romantic. The artist drifts to sleep at night, to be awakened by the subliminal echoes of his or her next brilliant idea. The truth, for me at least, is that creativity is primarily the result of hard work and study.” — Grant Achatz

3/23/2025: “I love the complicated logic of a perfect composition. It is not just the shapes and lines that make one travel through a painting. It's the placement of the strongest colors, the sharpest lines, and the dominant shapes.” — Kathryn Stats

3/22/2025: “Art can be an alert or early warning signal in response to what’s happening in the world.” — Shepard Fairey

3/21/2025: “The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality-something approaching the work of God.” — D.T. Suzuki

3/20/2025: "Build an object as though it were to last a thousand years and as if you were to die tomorrow.” — Thomas Francis Moser

3/19/2025: “When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks.“ — Émile Zola

3/18/2025: “What I wanted to do was to raise questions about the quality of works of art — to find a way to engage the public and encourage them to decide for themselves what was good or bad. Most museums validate work — they tell the public what’s good by virtue of inclusion and what isn’t by virtue of exclusion. Was there really such a thing as “bad” art, I wondered, and if so, who set the standards? The artists? The public? The critics? Or, God forbid, my relatives?” — Marcia Tucker [founder of the New Museum in NYC]

3/17/2025: “Maybe being an artist is a kind of detachment. You're in the cave, you're isolated, you're apart from everything and it's there you can find out what you believe in, or what is - what is the nature of being, as you see it.” — Gerald Stern

3/16/2025: "Do I think my work should sell for this much? -- No. Did I arrive at my studio this morning same time I always do? -- Yes." -- Brian Donnelly [the artist also known as KAWS, after a piece sold for an exorbitant price at a Hong Kong auction]

3/15/2025: “Watercolor is like life. Better get it right the first time--you don't get a second chance!” — Sergei Bongart

3/14/2025: “What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.” — Jane Seymour

3/13/2025: "Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.” — Leonardo da Vinci

3/12/2025: "If you thoroughly mix the color on the palette, you will kill the color. Mixing ahead of time only works when you're painting the kitchen walls!" — Aleksander Titovets

3/11/2025: “A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.” — Paul Gardner

3/10/2025: “Art – my slats! Guts! Guts! Life! Life! I can paint with a shoe-string dipped in pitch and lard.” — George Luks

3/9/2025: “What's better about a painting is that you can give it birth without a social security number, leave it alone without charges of neglect, and kill it without a prison sentence.” — Bonnie Mandoe

3/7/2025: "One must be of one's time and paint what one sees." — Édouard Manet

3/6/2025: “I rose, broke the sky by my head, looked around: How beautiful, how miraculous the world is! And I cut it into pieces and painted in the workshop.” — Ivan Marchuk, Ukrainian artist

3/5/2025: “I don’t know if a little hungry child would rejoice so much, as I rejoiced yesterday when I received your gift… I rejoiced so much that I didn’t sleep all night, looked through all the things, three times turned in my hands and kissed every paint.” — Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian artist, to his friend Andriy Lyzohub who gave him a gift of many tubes of paint.

3/4/2025: “It’s not about what you paint, it’s about how you paint it.” — Mykola Soloviov (Ukranian landscape painter)

3/3/2025: “Every artist is doing something which nobody else can do. Every killed artist makes Ukrainian culture less rich, more poor.” — Volodymyr Yermolenko

3/2/2025: “Sometimes that which appears to be a metaphor turns out to be more real than reality itself” — Georgy Senchenko (Ukrainian artist)

3/1/2025: “The face and soul of man, the drama of life, the impressions of nature, its life and meaning, the spirit of history—these are our themes.” — Ilya Repin

2/28/2025: “Art in a way is something to be lived with and is a product of life. It's not, as it were, a specialization that you have to go to a museum to see.” — Antony Gormley

2/27/2025: “I don’t think it’s good to have an adversarial relationship with either aging or death. In 2012, when I started “The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction” (the pieces were ceramic, glass and bronze), I wanted to come to grips with my mortality, which I’ve been very aware of since childhood.” -- Judy Chicago

2/26/2025: “Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.” — Jules Feiffer

2/25/2025: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.” — William Faulkner

2/24/2025: “The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.” — Robert Rauschenberg

2/23/2025: “The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.” — Marina Abramovic

2/22/2025: “The artist should fear to become the slave of detail.” — Albert Pinkham Ryder

2/21/2025: “…there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it.” — Erica Jong [who was discussing writing, but this quote also seems to me to be appropriate to the visual arts]

2/20/2025: “The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life.” — Mary Cassatt

2/19/2025: “The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.” — Balthasar Klossowski de Rola [‘Balthus’]

2/18/2025: “I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.” — Frida Kahlo

2/17/2025: “Give paint a chance to show itself entirely as paint.” — John Marin

2/16/2025: "I think there’s an artist hidden at the bottom of every single one of us.” — Bob Ross

2/15/2025: “On a series of apparently tiresome, flat sittings seeming to lead nowhere – one day something happens, the touches seem to 'take', the deaf canvas listens, your words flow and you have done something.” — Walter Sickert

2/14/2025: "Valentine's Day without the arts -- whether a song, a painting, a sonnet or even the graphics on a tacky card -- is a bit like a National Forest without trees or a riverbed without water. Technically, it’s still there, but who’s really going to enjoy it?" — Mac

2/13/2025: "Abstract art is a wonderful way of demonstrating that one doesn't always need to make sense in order to be seen as profound." — Lilliana Trescott

2/12/2025: “In a successful painting everything is integral – all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.” — Richard Diebenkorn

2/11/2025: “As I wash the paint from my aching hands, there are changes in my soul, each vibrant color spiraling down the drain contains spent emotions, needless worries and bad decisions... sometimes it doesn't come off easily.” — Eric Frantz

2/10/2025: “To point is to know how to put nothing on the canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.” — Robert Henri

2/9/2025: “Between the image of the Imagist and the 'symbol' of the Symbolists there is a difference only of precision” — René Taupin

2/8/2025: “I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.” — Banksy

2/7/2025: “In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty.” — Betty and Theodore Roszak [in their book "Deep Form in Art and Nature"]

2/6/2025: “To express himself well, the artist should be hidden... The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a laborer, and not have delusions of grandeur.” — Pierre-Auguste Renoir,

2/5/2025: "Keep on working, and tell yourself that you are a better artist than anyone else.” — Alice Mackler

2/4/2025: "More than 100 monuments to Stalin can now be found across Russia, the majority of them erected over President Vladimir Putin’s 24 years in power.” — Robert Coalson [reporting in the Eurasian Review — a classic example of art being subverted for the sake of propaganda].

2/3/2025: “Half the time when I paint, I'm twenty feet back.” — Barse Miller

2/2/2025: “Unlike in music, we painters have the freedom to layer over the sour notes or crop off the discord.” — Stella Reinwald

2/1/2025: “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa." — Grant Wood

1/31/2025: “The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art.” — Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

1/30/2025: “Life is very short... but I would like to live four times and if I could, I would set out to do no other things than I am seeking now to do.” — William Merritt Chase

1/29/2025: “Don't try to make comparisons between your own pictures. Forget what you have done and think only of making the best of what you are doing.” — William Merritt Chase

1/28/2025: “No small dabs of color - you want plenty of paint to paint with. — John Singer Sargent

1/27/2025: Who would be an artist that was perfectly happy? Maybe nowadays, but when I grew up in the '60s, you had nobody in the art club who was popular. No cheerleaders in the art club. I was told that I couldn't be a painter by my first painting teacher. I said I wanted to go to Cooper and be an art student, and he said, "You'll be a waitress." It was really the strangely indifferent parenting. — Amy Sillman [who became a very successful painter]

1/26/2025: "Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Color, Form and Position, Distance and Proximity, Motion and Rest." — Leonardo [di ser Piero] da Vinci [note: some translations from the Italian use “Propinquity” instead of “Proximity”, but within this context, the meaning is essentially the same either way]

1/25/2025: "It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand." — Michelangelo [di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni]

1/24/2025: “In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.” — Marc Chagall

1/23/2025: "Let me earnestly recommend... one studio which you may freely enter and receive in liberal measure the most sure and safe instruction.... the Studio of Nature." — Asher B. Durand

1/22/2025: "At night, which is when I like to work, I like to think I have conversations with Goya. He died so many years ago, of course, but somehow, his ghost is always with me." — Rebecca Horn

1/21/2025: "When realism as an art movement came along, it portrayed ordinary life and illuminated the beauty found in the simplicity of truth. Since then, many other movements have come and gone, but realism as a movement is still very much alive.” — Mac

1/20/2025: “One of the things authoritarians do in order to secure their place and dominate population is to destroy the culture.” — Spencer (St. Louis)

1/19/2025: “I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors. This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself” — Winslow Homer

1/18/2025: "Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is." — Bob Ross

1/17/2025: "A few weeks ago an artist on Twitter offerred that I have not yet matured into a signature style. If I were to have responded in kind, I would have told the artist they hadn't matured yet beyond discovering a single approach that they could pull off convincingly". — Eric Wayne

1/16/2025: “I’ve been blessed to know a lot of artists who are also mothers, who don’t necessarily go the cliché route of “motherhood ruins you.” It has always been more nuanced conversations, about the joy found in some aspects of parenting, how this perspective does and doesn’t inform creative life, and how one has a full community life as an artist even if one isn’t as a mother.” — Kaitlyn Greenidge

1/15/2025: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” — Wassily Kandinsky

1/14/2025: “Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.” — John Ruskin

1/13/2025: “To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.” — Edward Weston

1/12/2025: “In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

1/11/2025: "Art is a nation's most precious heritage." -- Lyndon B. Johnson

1/10/2025: “True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.” — Albert Einstein

1/9/2025: “The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.” — Norman Rockwell

1/8/2025: “Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.” — Ned Rorem

1/7/2025: “Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.” — Guillaume Apollinaire

1/6/2025: "Before bed I'm looking at art. When I wake up I'm looking at art. So I don't ever switch off. But I love it, so why would I want to?" — Kieron Williamson

1/5/2025: “This pressure to stick to one avenue of expression, and the exclusion of stylistic innovation, serves to choke artists' creativity, and contextualizes them as craftpersons making pretty baubles for the marketplace." — Eric Wayne

1/4/2025: “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” — Frank Zappa

1/3/2025: “I want to paint with colors that rhyme.” — Dave Watland

12/29/2024: "The great hidden tradition in painting is time, and art historians miss it constantly - time and the unfolding of awareness. The movement of consciousness is the real subject of a lot of old master paintings." — Bill Viola

12/28/2024: “It was Homer who gave laws to the artist.” — Francis Wayland

12/27/2024: “The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved.” — Ben Shahn

12/26/2024: “With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.” — Norman Mailer [Mailer was an artist as well as an author]

12/25/2024: "Art can be the gift you give to the world, wrapped in your unique style, and left somewhere for others to discover, like a gift placed under a Christmas tree." — Mac

12/24/2024: "You're just lucky to be conscious for a limited amount of time, and what you're able to do with your consciousness is up to you. You don't win anything. There's nothing to win." — Frank Stella

12/23/2024: "I wanted to create art that made people stop and look. You've got to get 'em and hold 'em: The more they look, the more they see." — Faith Ringgold

12/22/2024: “A good sculpture can be rolled downhill without breaking.” — Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

12/21/2024: “The advice I would give to any photographer - young, old or in-between - is to explore anything visual because this is, after all, how you express your artistry. Look at paintings, movies, drawings, sculptures - look at anything visual and try to integrate that into your visual sense. After that, go out and take pictures and keep on taking pictures!” — Elliott Erwitt

12/20/2024: “Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms. Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason” — Representative George Dondero, MI (R) [I found this quote to be both hilariously wrong and frighteningly stupid. Rep. Dondero said this in 1949, falsely claiming that the modern art movements of the day were really communist plots intended to destroy America …. for context, this was while senator Joseph McCarthy’s ‘red scare’ was in progress. Neither McCarthy’s witch hunts nor Dondero’s art criticism have aged well. America did not fall due to cubism or abstract expressionism. In fact, the latter became a small part of a secret campaign to undermine the Soviet Union. McCarthy’s allegations of communists infiltrating the government proved to be mostly false. After the fall of the Soviet Union, and aided by the ‘Venona decryptions’, it was proven that of 159 he accused, only 9 actually worked to help Soviet spying efforts, while several hundred real spies were never named on any of McCarthy’s lists.]

12/19/2024: “I think every artist needs a rule that's stupid but that helps him, like a deadline would.” — Thomas Mars

12/18/2024: "The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art." — Leonardo da Vinci [see his drawings of the foot at https://www.leonardodavinci.net/skeleton-foot.jsp#google_vignette]

12/17/2024: ‘The slavery at Bufford's was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any.” — Winslow Homer [recounting his time as a young apprentice to John H. Bufford as a lithographic engraver… time he apparently did not enjoy!]

12/16/2024: “Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.” — Robert Hughes

12/15/2024: “You can only learn to paint by drawing, for drawing is a way of reserving a place for color in advance.” — Andre L'Hote

12/13/2024: “If you want to learn to paint, paint every morning before breakfast.” — Tom Shropshire

12/12/2024: “A little amateur painting in water-color shows the innocent and quiet mind.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

12/11/2024: “These are not paintings in the usual sense; they are life and death merging in fearful union. As for me, they kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.” — Clyfford Still

12/10/2024: “Painting is stronger than I am. It can make me do whatever it wants.” — Pablo Picasso

12/9/2024: “…And so I literally almost go into a trance. The music is going loud. The paint is juicy, the brushes are flexible, the canvas moves when you touch it. And the color is luscious, the paint is buttery. It's a sensual thing - especially a big canvas that's a little larger than you in all ways - and you just throw yourself into it.” — Fritz Scholder

12/8/2024: “My advice: Buy art you like, not art as an investment, because predicting which works will rise or fall in value is like predicting the flight path of a mosquito in a hurricane.” — Mac

12/7/2024: “I have nobody to help me out. . I was a poor man. . . . I think if I hire a man he don’t know what to do. A million times I don’t know what to do myself. . . Some of the people think I was crazy. . . .I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised here you understand? I wanted to do something for the United States because there are nice people in this country.” — Simon Rodia [creator of the “Watts Towers”]

12/6/2024: “Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.” — Henry Moore

12/5/2024: “The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth” — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

12/4/2024: “It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color — not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.” — Henri Matisse

12/3/2024: “Art is struggle. It may all be in vain. But no one who cares about art can give up the struggle for one very simple reason: Even on the best days, even when the world isn’t going mad with delusion and hatred, art is a struggle to stay sane and live with purpose. It’s always been about surviving the darkness.” -- Philip Kennicott

12/2/2024: “Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

12/1/2024: “I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.” — Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola)

11/30/2024: “For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.” — John Berger

11/29/2024: “…for great things do not just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.” — Vincent Van Gogh

11/28/2024: “My paintings evolve organically from life's everyday glances. Rather than trying to force my will on them, I give them total control. Each layer determines and guides the next.” — Dion Archibald

11/27/2024: "Etretat is becoming more and more amazing. Now is the real moment: the beach with all its fine boats; it is superb, and I am enraged not to be more skillful in rendering all this. I would need two hands and hundreds of canvases." — Claude Monet

11/26/2024: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." — Marcel Duchamp

11/25/2024: “When did art stop being about creating something substantial and start being about looking clever while using half a roll of duct tape? You can’t call an empty box profound just because you told people it could contain the universe. I’ll take a Rodin any day over a square of foam and a PowerPoint presentation.” — Sjoren Adlersen

11/24/2024: “I never thought I’d say ‘$5 million for a banana’” — auctioneer Oliver Barker [while auctioning "the Comedian" by Maurizio Cattelan, for a total of $6.2 Million including auction fees. The purchaser recieved the artwork, which consists of a banana, a roll of duct tape, fourteen pages of specific instructions on how to tape the banana to a wall and how to repace it when it rots, and a 'certificate of authenticity'. The purchaser, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, has said that he intends to eat the banana.]

11/23/2024: “If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.” — Elizabeth Peyton

11/22/2024: "What I love most about modern abstraction is how it encourages the viewer to believe in the power of the unknown, even when there's nothing to discover." — Isotella Rayese

11/21/2024: “Art is stronger than nature” — Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)

11/20/2024: "I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential". — Elizabeth Catlett

11/19/2024: "From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own." — Katsushika Hokusai

11/18/2024: “If painting came easily, if the answers, the solutions, were obvious, I'd find another occupation.” — Karen Jacobs

11/17/2024: “For the surface, I'm not interested in painterly convention. It's more interesting if it looks like it painted itself.” — Wanda Koop

11/16/2024: "When I make a mistake in acrylic or oils, I can paint over it and start that part again. In graphite, erasers work wonders. In pen and ink, I have to find a way to make the mistake part of the picture." — Mac

11/15/2024: “The artist does not express himself in art forms, he finds himself therein. He does not adulterate his free self-expression to make it socially current, he finds free self-expression only in the social relations embodied in art . . . In synthesizing experience with society’s, in pressing his inner self into the mold of social relations, he not only creates a new mold, a socially valuable product, but he also molds and creates his own self.” — Christopher Caudell

11/14/2024: "I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well." — John F. Kennedy

11/13/2024: “Good painting is like good cooking: it can be tasted, but not explained.” — Maurice de Vlaminck

11/12/2024: “The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.” — Voltaire

11/11/2024: “I don’t try to create palatable images, because the world can be a dark and brutal place, and I’ve been there. I take some inspiration from Goya in that he worked in a journalistic fashion. While he can say, ‘I saw it,’ as can contemporary journalists, only a Soldier or anyone else caught up in a war can say, ‘I felt it.’” -- Aaron Baldón [creator of "The Returned Warrior", the 2024 Claremont Graduate University President's Art Award winner]

11/10/2024: "You must always try to imitate someone else, but the fact is you can't. You would like to, you try, but you make a botch of the whole thing. And it's at that point, when you make a botch of the whole thing, that you are yourself." — Eric Wayne, quoting (or paraphrasing?) one of his drawing instructors

11/9/2024: "Who would prefer a bad original to a good fake?" — Elmyr de Hory [who was a skilled art forger, making fakes of Matisse, Renoir, Modigliani and others. He led a very interesting if somewhat tragic life; look him up on Wikipedia!... My $0.02: copying works, or working in another artist’s style, is a long-standing practice in the art world, both for students to learn and for the public to be able to afford works they love… and that’s OK. Where it crosses the line into forgery is when the copy is represented as the real thing - that’s immoral and illegal.]

11/8/2024: "With the advent of AI, getting better by the second, plagiarism has become magnitudes greater a threat than it was a year ago. I suddenly realize as an artist myself, my only chance is to build on the small following I already have. Social media and the art markets will be flooded with tens or hundreds of millions of AI artworks, drowning out that achievements of humans in very short order. This is already a problem on Deviantart, and in NFT spaces." — Eric Wayne

11/7/2024: “Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with.” — Alice Hoffman

11/6/2024: “The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.” — T. E. Hulme

11/5/2024: "The sky must be a medium, it cannot be just a background. It not only gives the painting depth through the several plans that follow each other (because the sky, like the earth, has several plans), but through its own form and through its interaction with all the other elements of the picture, it creates movement.... I always start painting from the sky." — Alfred Sisley

11/4/2024: “The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product.” — Grace Glueck

11/3/2024: “Even a true artist does not always produce art.” — Carroll O'Connor

11/1/2024: “The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.” — Albert Camus

10/31/2024: “Halloween is when art lets loose… just look how those costumes ‘color outside the lines’ of everyday life." — Mac

10/30/2024: “The big artist does not sit down monkey like & copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dungpile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature & steals her tools. He learns what she does with light the big tool & then color then form and appropriates them to his own use.” — Thomas Eakins

10/29/2024: “An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.” — Patti Smith

10/28/2024: “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he’s a painter, ears if he’s a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he’s a poet — or even, if he’s a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate, or pleasing events in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How is it possible to be uninterested in other men, and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously? No, painting is not meant to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” — Pablo Picasso

10/27/2024: “When I first started all this, it was mostly music fans that came along, Stones fans. But now, I'm being taken seriously. I've got highfalutin art collectors and everything!” — Ronnie Wood

10/26/2024: “I have come to the conclusion that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only a part of itself. It only attains full stature with what people and time make of it. It involves the whole complex of human relation to life. It is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living.” — Naum Gabo

10/25/2024: “My job is to help the world…That is what an artist's job is—to the degree that we can. That is nothing more than holding up a mirror and saying, 'You're beautiful, baby.' Or holding up a mirror and saying, 'Look at the shit that you're doing to yourself. Maybe you should stop.' It is an artist's job to speak truth to power.” — Nora Keita Jemisin

10/24/2024: “Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind.” — Georges Rouault

10/23/2024: “You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.” — Salvador Dali

10/22/2024: “Art is nature as seen through a temperament.” — Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

10/21/2024: “I have touched with a sense of art some people-they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?” — Mary Cassatt

10/20/2024: “I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.” — John Singer Sargent [Sargent continued to paint portraits until his death in 1925]

10/19/2024: “A rain-tight roof, frugal living, a box of colors, and God's sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one's daily work.” — Albert Pinkham Ryder

10/18/2024: “Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” — John Ruskin

10/17/2024: “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.” — Georgia O'Keeffe

10/16/2024: “Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.” — Billy Joel

10/15/2024: “The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.” — Vincent Van Gogh

10/14/2024: “A Good artist has less time than ideas.” — Martin Kippenberger

10/13/2024: “The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” — Paul Strand

10/12/2024: “Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.” — Jackson Pollock

10/11/2024: “Painting should educate and enrich. Modern painting merely offers a split-second emotion: You see it, you have an instant reaction and move on. Instead, real painting can be looked at over and over again and each time it has something new.” — Igor Babailov

10/10/2024: "Art owes its origin to Nature herself... this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it." — Giorgio Vasari

10/9/2024: "There are always flowers for those who want to see them." — Henri Matisse

10/8/2024: “Combine a certain amount of indifference with your ambition. Be carefully careless. If you don't succeed today, there is always tomorrow.” — William Merritt Chase

10/7/2024: “You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.” — John Singer Sargent

10/6/2024: “Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There’s no better feeling. It’s beauteous. But it’s always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.” — Damian Hirst

10/5/2024: “What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.” — Kehinde Wiley

10/4/2024: …”the embarrassing part about it was walking back to pick it up and act like nothing happened.” — Kevin Nguyen [Kevin and his friend TJ Khayatan placed Kevin’s glasses on the floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see if gallery-goers would think that they were a modern art installation…. and they did; several even took pictures of the “work”.]

10/3/2024: “What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.” — John Updike

10/2/2024: “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” — Emile Zola

10/1/2024: “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.” — Charles M. Schulz

9/30/2024: “To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love. — Matt Haig

9/20/2024: “I think one’s art is just one’s effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.” — Robert Motherwell

9/28/2024: “I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's clever it's an anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.” — the artist known as “Banksy”

9/27/2024: [reportedly said while fishing]: “I'd rather be painting. At least with painting you have something to show.” — Toni Onley

9/26/2024: “Brushstroke and color are key. The subject doesn't matter after that.” — Bobbie Burgers

9/25/2024: “Art history has always sifted old art through the perspectives of prevailing cultures. This is both a problem and a virtue. The problem is that many worthy works are disregarded due to cultural prejudices (although as culture shifts, some works are rediscovered). The virtue is that a long term perspective overcomes the excitement of trendy fads; it helps sort the artistic “wheat” from the “chaff”. Alas, contemporary art has yet to be winnowed for lasting value; there’s a lot of trendy chaff in the mix.” — Mac

9/24/2024: "The most important thing a painter can do is find a good place to sit." — J E H MacDonald

9/23/2024: “Pablo? Oh, Pablo used to be a good painter; now he’s just a genius.” - Georges Braque, speaking about Pablo Picasso

9/22/2024: "It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block." — Paul Gauguin

9/21/2024: “I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful”. — Elizabeth Catlett

9/20/2024: "If you go outside every single day, you finally become aware of everything that's in front of you. The whole painting is about life size, a five foot by five foot patch of ground, so I'm going to see everything on that". — Catherine Murphy [speaking about her painting "Canopy"]

9/19/2024: “Be generous with your paint. Put out twice as much as you think you will need... and use all of it.” — Chuck Rawle

9/18/2024: “Both writing and music are read in a linear fashion, but paintings are read 'all at once' and only subsequently admired or condemned for their individual notes.” — Kalim Prasad

9/17/2024: “Painting is nothing but color. There's nothing else - that's all there is in painting.” — Larry Poons

9/16/2024: “A law of composition: If it does not fit do not force it; it is not for it.” — Jack Bartholomew

9/15/2024: “I don’t do cliché dragons, like you see on GoT. I only do fat, happy dragons that would never dream of incinerating a village — although they wouldn’t be above roasting a marshmallow or lighting a barbeque…” — Mac

9/14/2024: “Listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling. Be firm, be meek, but follow your own convictions. It is better to be nothing than an echo of other painters.” — Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

9/13/2024: “…Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — John Keats, from the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

9/12/2024: “If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” — Steven Pressfield, from his book “The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle”

9/11/2024: “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever... and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.” — Frederic Remington

9/10/2024: “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” — Willem de Kooning

9/9/2024: “When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artist to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn.” — Walt Disney

9/8/2024: “I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.” — Lou Reed

9/7/2024: “Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.” — Andrew Wyeth

9/6/2024: “To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life”. — Diego Rivera

9/5/2024: “Work at the same time on sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis... Don't be afraid of putting on color... Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.” — Camille Pissarro

9/4/2024: "Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power." — Leonardo da Vinci

9/3/2024: “In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.” — Hans Hofmann

9/2/2024: “The difficulties in drawing the figure – that is, manipulating and using the figure in a composition – are enormous.” — Martha Mayer Erlebacher

9/1/2024: “When I paint a landscape, I get the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work out a visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images.” — Ian Hornak

8/31/2024: “A landscape painting in which composition is ignored is like a line taken from a poem at random: it lacks context, and may or may not make sense.” — Walter J. Phillips

8/30/2024: “PAINTING, n. the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.” — Ambrose Bierce (a satirical definition from “the Devil’s Dictionary”… bonus quote: he also wrote “ART, n. This word has no definition.”)

8/29/2024: “Painting is easy, getting it right is the hard bit.” — Danny Byrne

8/28/2024: “One paints a flower [the same way] as a portrait, a tree as a figure, a boat as a stone--all simply colors, values, and textures arranged as shapes of interlocking lights and shadows.” — Michele Cooper

8/27/2024: "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." — Paul Gauguin

8/26/2024: "One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it!" — Marcel Duchamp

8/25/2024: “There is no must in art because art is free.” — Wassily Kandinsky

8/24/2024: “It is the first vision that counts. The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other... for no two visions are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama.” — Albert Pinkham Ryder

8/23/2024: “Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.” — Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

8/22/2024: “I think an artist is anybody who does something well, like if you cook well.” — Andy Warhol

8/21/2024: “All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.” — W. H. Auden

8/20/2024: “If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?” — Ai Weiwei

8/19/2024: “I think the time is rapidly coming when it will be possible . . . to systematize confusion thanks to a paranoiac and active process of thought, and so assist in discrediting completely the world of reality.” — Salvador Dali [the date of this quote is interesting: 1931]

8/18/2024: “I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.” — Henri Matisse

8/17/2024: “Every good painter paints what he is.” — Jackson Pollock

8/16/2024: “As an artist, it is central to be unsatisfied.” — Lawrence Calcagno

8/15/2024: “It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.” — Hilton Als

8/14/2024: “When you come up in the art world, whatever’s in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.” — Chuck Close

8/13/2024: “For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.” — Georges Rouault

8/12/2024: “Paint like a pig eats”. — Richard Schmid

8/11/2024: “A painting that is well composed is half finished.” — Rohan Baikar

8/10/2024: “Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.” — James Elkins

8/9/2024: “I regard paint like mustard – it has to be freshly squeezed out, juicy and plentiful. Anything else and you're not giving yourself a chance.” — Ron Ranson

8/8/2024: "I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy." — George Tooker

8/7/2024: "The beauty of art is in its ability to last. It takes risks in order to survive, and it helps us, then, to recover from the damage we have endured. And just occasionally, we soar." — Colum McCann [in reference to Philippe Petit's tightrope walk in 1974]

8/6/2024: “Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without things.” — Kazimir Malevich [Kazimir Malevich led quite the interesting, if tragic, life - look it up on Wikipedia. He’s the famous - or is that infamous? - painter of “white on white”, among other famous pieces.]

8/5/2024: “Pricing art is kind of like deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – many claim expertise, but very few truly understand the cryptic messages.” — Mac

8/4/2024: “My work first engaged with the early Russian avant-garde; the paintings of Moholy-nagy, el Lissitzky's 'prouns' and Naum Gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of Kasimir Malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design.” — Zaha Hadid

8/3/2024: “Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye, it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” — Edvard Munch

8/2/2024: "Big art is a process of elimination... Cut down and out-do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about, to imagine" — Frederic Remington

8/1/2024: “Cezanne is one of the most liberal artists I have ever seen... he grants that everyone may be as honest and as true to nature from their convictions; he doesn't believe that everyone should see alike.” — Mary Cassatt

7/31/2024: “I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they.” — Berthe Morisot

7/30/2024: “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.” — Pablo Picasso

7/29/2024: “Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.” — Miguel Angel Ruiz

7/28/2024: “Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.” — Joyce Cary [Interestingly, Joyce Cary decided that he could never be a great painter and instead became a writer - a different kind of artist. In the US, he is probably best known for his novel “Mr. Johnson”, which was made into a 1990 movie staring Pierce Brosnan.]

7/27/2024: “I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.” — Henry Adams (from “The Letters of Henry Adams”)

7/26/2024: “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.” — Martha Graham [Martha Graham was a dancer and choreographer, who was speaking in this quote about all of the arts, not just dance]

7/25/2024: “Art expresses those unexplainable thoughts of our soul.” — Debasish Mridha

7/24/2024: “I value those artists who embody the expression of their life.” — Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky

7/23/2024: “I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.” — Georg Baselitz

7/22/2024: “The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.” — Eric Gill

7/21/2024: "I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me." — Henri Matisse

7/20/2024: "You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest." — Paul Cezanne

7/19/2024: "What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?" — Michelangelo

7/18/2024: “The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.” — Vincent van Gogh

7/17/2024: "My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work. To leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom through significant form and design rather than through the diversions of so-called free and accidental brush handling." — Andrew Wyeth

7/16/2024: “The painter must leave the beholder something to guess.” — Ernst Gombrich

7/15/2024: "I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things." — Henri Matisse

7/14/2024: "People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love." — Claude Monet

7/13/2024: “Many times we destroy our work by going back over it again and again. I tell my students, 'The more strokes it takes, the more mud it makes.' “ — Sandra Meyer

7/12/2024: “Painting is the most joyous, rewarding, self-forgetting, spiritually enhancing thing I have ever done. If I had enough dollars, I would just paint, and paint and paint, and not care a hoot if I sold one or not.” — Tricia Migdoll

7/11/2024: “I begin painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors, which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images.” — Robert Motherwell

7/10/2024: “Painting is much more than a pastime or hobby. It is a way to place our energy, feelings, and soul before the viewer.” — Stephen Quiller

7/9/2024: “It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.” — Camille Pissarro

7/7/2024: “Intensity is all that matters in painting.” — John Piper

7/6/2024: “Art is a she-devil of a mistress, and if at times in earlier days she would not even stoop to my way of thinking, I have preserved and so will continue.” — Frederic Remington

7/5/2024: “Always in movement—that is how the Greek philosophers saw the essential being of the soul—so, I have tried to tear out just a few scraps of that beauty which makes up the miracles of the Cosmos and which is in the multifacetedness of life.” — Mark Tobey

7/4/2024: "Think about the wealth of art centered around Independence Day, acting as a bridge that connects us through creativity and expression."

7/3/2024: “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” — Steven Pressfield,

7/2/2024: “That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.” — Damien Hirst

7/1/2024: “Truth is ugly: we have art lest we perish from the truth" — Friedrich Nietzsche

6/30/2024: “Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

6/29/2024: “The arts incarnate the creativity of a free people" — John F. Kennedy

6/28/2024: “Since art exists for humanity it is not unreasonable to assume that humanity has some rights in the matter. Who pays the piper calls the tune. An artist cannot be at once a rebel and a comfortable citizen.” — Walter J. Phillips

6/27/2024: “I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.” — Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

6/26/2024: “Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished.” — William Merritt Chase

6/25/2024: “Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.” — John Singer Sargent

6/24/2024: “The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.” — Wassily Kandinsky

6/23/2024: “An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.” — Jean Cocteau

6/22/2024: “Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference.” — Tristan Tzara

6/21/2024: “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.” — Albert Pinkham Ryder

6/20/2024: “Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.” — John Berger

6/19/2024: “The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.” — Jackson Pollock

6/18/2024: “In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.” — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

6/17/2024: “The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” — Auguste Rodin

6/16/2024: “The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful.” — George Bellows

6/15/2024: “My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.” — Ai Weiwei

6/14/2024: “I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpening exercises.” — Maurice Sendak

6/13/2024: “If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.” — Grandma Moses

6/12/2024: “The art that I make and that I see others make confirms the miracle of being alive. Almost every day I live in a state of exaltation. The art of painting is to me sacred. It is central to all the other visual arts. This art is in a constant state of renewal.” — Joseph Plaskett

6/11/2024: (While in Antarctica): “Trying to mix frozen paint is like stirring sand.” — Alasdair McGregor

6/10/2024: “Value does the work; color gets the glory.” — Richard McKinley [explanatory note for any non-painters: by ‘value’, painters mean shades of light vs dark, not monetary worth]

6/9/2024: “Everybody has called Pop Art “American” painting, but it’s actually industrial painting. . . . I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial, it’s what the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, so it won’t be American; it will be universal.” — Roy Lichtenstein, in 1963 [apparently Lichtenstein was a better painter and self-promoter than prognosticator…]

6/8/2024: “Propaganda was an important component in Hitler’s rise to power in the second half of the 1920s and the early 1930s. The Nazi propaganda machine led by Joseph Goebbels, who became Reich Minister of Propaganda in 1933, was sending out clear messages addressing the German people's fear of uncertainty and instability with the Great Depression, and runaway inflation....The striking graphic art of many of the Nazi posters made them as effective as they were meant to be. As I have written before, all art is political, and history proves that it can provide a powerful assist on the road to disaster.” — Gerald Stiebel

6/7/2024: “I paint flowers so they will not die.” — Frida Kahlo

6/6/2024: “The true artist does not create art as an end in itself; he creates art for human beings. Humanity is the goal.” — Bronislaw Huberman

6/5/2024: “There is a certain honesty to pen and ink that I find irresistible. Sometimes I'll sketch with pencil, which I erase after inking - but even so, pen and ink requires commitment. Once the ink hits the paper, that's it; there is no way to undo what has been done. Watercolor is similar, although it sometimes allows a very limited bit of re-working.” — Mac

6/4/2024: “I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it.” — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

6/3/2024: “Painting is an awkwardly intimate art form, quite different from the mechanical printing press or an MP3 anonymously shared across networks. A painting has within it the traces of its own production, the labor in a brushstroke. The hand of the creator is visible in the work itself.” — Rex Sorgatz

6/2/2024: “Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.” — George Tooker

6/1/2024: “In my opinion painters owe to Giotto, the Florentine painter, exactly the same debt they owe to nature, which constantly serves them as a model and whose finest and most beautiful aspects they are always striving to imitate and reproduce.” — Giorgio Vasari

5/31/2024: “Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.” — Ellsworth Kelly

5/30/2024: “How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.” — Paul Gauguin

5/29/2024: “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.” — Vincent Van Gogh

5/28/2024: “I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.” — Morris Graves

5/27/2024: "My father defined our trade quite simply, --we try to convince someone who does not want to sell, to sell, and someone who does not want to buy, to buy. That could never be more true than today when everyone with a collection wants to hold on for a better selling climate and those who wish to collect have no expendable cash!" — Gerald Stiebel (writing about art dealers)

5/26/2024: "I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." — Marcel Duchamp

5/25/2024: “Often, the difference between great art and mediocre art has nothing to do with the piece itself and everything to do with the perceptions of the viewer.” — Mac

5/24/2024: "No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters." — Edgar Degas

5/23/2024: "I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing." — Paul Cezanne

5/22/2024: “Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.” — President John F. Kennedy

5/21/2024: “There is an art to science and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.” — Isaac Asimov

5/20/2024: “Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” — Winston Churchill

5/19/2024: “When seen as a whole, art derives from a person’s desire to communicate himself to another. I do not believe in an art which is not forced into existence by a human being’s desire to open his heart. All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart’s blood. Art is your heart’s blood.” — Edvard Munch

5/18/2024: “Art is a simile of the Creation. Each work of art is an example, just as the terrestrial is an example of the cosmic.” — Paul Klee

5/15/2025: “. . . a woman, a tree, a cow are concrete in the natural state, but in the context of painting they are abstract, illusory, vague, speculative—while a [geometric] plane is a plane, a line is a line, nothing less, nothing more.” — Theo Van Doesburg [Van Doesburg was implying that old-fashioned ‘representative form’ in painting is somehow dishonest, while ‘modernist’ pure abstraction is honest… Um, well, OK then…]

5/14/2024: “People profess to see poetry in what I have done. No, I only apply my method.” — Georges Seurat

5/13/2024: “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” — Andy Warhol

5/12/2024: “We need the arts because they make us full human beings. But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism. In saving the arts, we save ourselves from a society where creative production is permissible only insofar as it serves the instruments of power. When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid — not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again.” — Eve L. Ewing

5/11/2024: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things." — Edgar Degas

5/10/2024: “The water color process takes me and itself to a destination I hadn't even known existed... Whatever I put down on the page, the paint will dry as it wants to.” — Joseph Raffael

5/9/2024: “Wet-into-wet works best when you are in the zone, the angels are singing, and you can do no wrong - after you have sweated blood to get there….” — Michael Epp

5/8/2024: “You can't get along without a knowledge of the principles and rules governing the influence of one color upon another. A mechanic might as well try to get along without tools.” — Winslow Homer

5/7/2024: “In the art market, even the forgeries have a story to tell – and sometimes, that story is ‘tax evasion.’” — ChatGPT

5/6/2024: “Painting doesn't cheat on me, die or otherwise desert me, and it certainly doesn't bore me.” — Brenda Behr

5/5/2024: “Paintings are painted with paint, not with ideas.” — Stephane Mallarme

5/4/2024: “Painting and sketching on-location gives you the opportunity to solve many painting problems... It allows you to break down the painting process into parts and work those parts individually.” — Tom Lynch

5/3/2024: “Painting requires the bravery of solitude. Painting requires disciplined labor. To be a painter is to search the world with a benevolent eye for every subtle beauty that the infinite world offers.” — Charles Philip Brooks

5/2/2024: “Happy are the young people who believe that it is easy.” — Claude Monet

5/1/2024: “One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.” — Georgia O'Keeffe

4/30/2024: “Painting is not about the product, but about the process – the philosophy that drives my life.” — Elin Pendleton [Just for the record, Mac thinks that without a product, the process is irrelevant…]

4/29/2024: “Throughout history symbols have been embedded in art to allow artists to hide clues in plain site circumnavigating authorities such as the Church, monarchies and lay people.  What were so many artists hiding? Usually their own beliefs or that of their patrons. Many times these beliefs went against mainstream thought of the era they lived in. Everything from flowers, arrows, ladders, clouds, etc. were used as symbols to signify the gamut of anti-papacy beliefs to much simpler ideas of love for fellow mankind.” — Amy Steinberg

4/28/2024: “If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.” — Marc Chagall

4/27/2024: “Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.” — Georges Braque

4/26/2024: “The sea is blue, but bluer than anyone has ever painted it, a color entirely fantastic and incredible. It is the blue of sapphires, of the peacock’s wing, of an Alpine glacier, and the kingfisher melted together; and yet it is like none of these, for it shines with the unearthly radiance of Neptune’s kingdom.” — Henri Matisse

4/25/2024: “The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?” — Richard P. Feynman

4/24/2024: “The diagonal gives energy to a composition. To jumble and tweak the balance is my spice of preference.” — Gail Siptak

4/23/2024: “A precision of composition and figuration is what I'm working toward. I've always felt viewers should have an experience without having to ask what the hell it was about.” — Eric Fischl

4/22/2024: “…after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done.” — Pierre Bonnard

4/21/2024: “It's very inconvenient being a sculptor. It's like playing the double-bass; one's so handicapped by one's baggage.” — Dorothy L. Sayers [I play the double bass and I sculpt, so I can really identify with this quote! Both require a lot of room, a lot of stuff, and attention to how it’s used…]

4/20/2024: “Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.” — Vincent Van Gogh

4/19/2024: “Take a relief. You draw it, you carve it out. Later you build it up from a flat surface. There is no other way to do a sculpture - you either add or you subtract.” — Urs Fischer

4/18/2024: “I recognize that it is through the engagement with my craft - by recognizing an idea and drawing it out, building physical models, collaborating with experts, constructing the sculptures at urban scale, and maintaining them through years of weather and interaction with the public - that a new art for cities has become real.” — Janet Echelman

4/17/2024: “I have always striven to fix beauty in wood, stone, glass or pottery, in oil or watercolor by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty, that has been my creed.” — Louis Comfort Tiffany

4/16/2024: “Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” — Kurt Vonnegut

4/15/2024: "There's a red Jeff Koons bunny sculpture in the lobby of 51 Astor Place [in NYC] that feels about as futile as hanging a painting of a flower on a wall of the death star" — M.H.Miller

4/14/2024: “Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.” — Paul Virilio

4/13/2024: "Just as a fine wine often deepens in complexity with each passing year and reveals itself in layers as it ‘opens up’ in the glass, a painting often also evolves with every layer and reveals more the longer you study it. Patience may reveal the beauty of transformation in both cases." — Mac

4/12/2024: "If your market's really solid, don't get psyched. Because it's not. You didn't do that. And if it's weak, don't get sad, because you didn't do that either....Once you agree to sell something, you're done. You know?" [in reference to the whims of the art auction market] -- Brian Donnelly (the artist also known as KAWS)

4/11/2024: “I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.” — Benvenuto Cellini [Cellini was kind of stuck on himself and quite a jerk]

4/10/2024: “All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.” — Alberto Giacometti

4/9/2024: “Sculpture is a parable in three dimensions, a symbol of a spiritual experience, and a means of conveying truth by concentrating its essence into visible form. ... It must be the reflection of the artist who creates it and of the era in which he lives, not an echo or a memory of other days and other ways.” — Malvina Hoffman

4/8/2024: “Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.” — Henry Moore

4/7/2024: “Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.” — Joe Bradley

4/6/2024: “I’ve been looking at oil paintings from oriental artists lately, and the one artist who’s inspired me right now is a man named Hokusai and I’ve had his book by my bed looking at how he interprets landscapes – mountains and water and flowers and birds.” — Renee O'Connor

4/5/2024: “I can’t believe someone’s letting me get away with this, either” — Brian Donnelly (a.k.a. “KAWS”)

4/4/2024: “Painting... we do not talk about it, we do not analyse it, we feel it.” — Bernard Buffet

4/3/2024: “Painting is just a tool; it is nothing in itself. What counts is how you do it.” — Michele Cassou

4/2/2024: “My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.” — Jimmy Carter

4/1/2024: “Painting and wine naturally go together — A painting captures the story of an artist's creative struggles at a moment in time; a wine bottle holds the story of a vintner's struggles with a single season's harvest.” — Mac

3/31/2024: “Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and color, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.” — Paul Cezanne

3/29/2024: “Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?” — Edvard Munch

3/27/2024: “Painting is a conversation. Make your speech deliberate, not full of babble, nonsense. Be sure of what you want to say.” — Timothy Chambers

3/26/2024: “Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.” — Banksy

[Just for the record, I do not endorse spray painting graffiti anywhere and everywhere… yes, it is vandalism. Banksy is a unique exception to everything we know about vandalism… and he carefully chooses locations for his graffiti where it will enhance, rather than harm, property that is not his.]

3/25/2024: “Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.” — Paul Strand

3/23/2024: “When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form, etc., I play off material against material, for example, wood against sackcloth.” — Kurt Schwitters

3/21/2024: “It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.” — William Merritt Chase

[Chase is not being literal; he’s referring to the tendency of many painters to over-work their piece…knowing when to stop is half the struggle!]

3/20/2024: “Painting is but another word for feeling.” — John Constable

3/19/2024: “I have told myself a hundred times that painting – that is, the material thing called a painting – is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.” — Eugene Delacroix

3/14/2024: “Art is about trying to find the good in people and making the world a more compassionate place.” — Keanu Reeves

3/13/2024: “Watercolor is an alchemical medium - colors mixing with water, joining with it, being extended by it - creating new life where none had been before.” — Joseph Raffael

3/12/2024: “I always have the idea in mind that when Botticelli was an old man nobody cared about him because he was out of fashion. Imagine, Botticelli was out of fashion!” — Norbert Bisky

3/11/2024: “When you start painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.” — Fernando Botero

3/10/2024: “The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.” — Georges Braque

3/9/2024: “Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do.” — Gyula Halasz, Brassa

3/8/2024: “The painter needs all the talent of the poet, plus hand-eye coordination.” — Robert Brault

3/7/2024: “If you control everything, with so much deliberateness, you can end up with a very unmoving, static piece of artwork, and that type of artwork doesn't really give the audience an opportunity to participate.” — C. W. Mundy

3/6/2024: “Painting, like baseball, is a game of averages. Artists try for a high batting average, but if you are batting a thousand, you are not pushing yourself. Your paintings will all start to look the same.” — Charles Muench

3/5/2024: “The process of painting offers an infinite array of possibilities. The closer in unification to just one of those, the better the painting becomes.” — David Louis

3/4/2024: “I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.” – David Rockefeller

3/3/2024: “The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live only as you can.” — Neil Gaiman

3/2/2024: “Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.” — Donatella Versace

3/1/2024: "There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing." — Marcel Duchamp

2/29/2024: “For some painters, the act of painting is more important than the result. They think of significant messages and feel emotions intensely while they “attack” the canvas, and because of the depth of their feelings, they assume the viewer will feel those same emotions and understand their messages regardless of composition, technique etc. This is not necessarily the case. The purpose behind developing one’s skills as a painter is to successfully convey those messages and intense emotions to the viewer.” — Mac

2/28/2024: “I wanted to make sure the last chapters of my life were full, and painting, it turns out, has helped occupy not only space but opened my mind.” — George W. Bush

2/26/2024: “Painting itself is a sort of high-wire act that involves every cell in your body and takes no prisoners. For this you need to carry your inspiration with you, but work it all out with your heart….” — Brett Busang

2/25/2024: “Paint every day. Every day you have to say, 'Get outta my way, I've gotta go paint!'“ — Robert Levers

2/24/2024: “What’s the best kind of art? The art you like, which doesn’t need to be what others like…Whether in galleries or on the streets, the best art for you is what your soul meets.” — Mac

2/23/2024: “The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” — Paul Strand

2/22/2024: "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." — Pablo Picasso

2/21/2024: “When I come across a Rembrandt in a museum, I try to train myself to see with even half of Rembrandt's humanity.” — David Brooks

2/20/2024: “If you do not have art in your soul, it’s time to search for your soul - for it has gone missing.” — Mac

2/19/2024: “This is an occupation known as painting, which calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.” — Cennino Cennini

2/18/2024: “He unfolds, as a painter, that which has not yet been said; he translates it into absolute terms of painting – something other than reality.” — Paul Cezanne

2/17/2024: “The act of painting is like a musician taking a solo on stage. My heart is captured by the spontaneity and the zest of improvisation.” — Richard McDaniel

2/16/2024: “The jostle we get from art can be found nearly anywhere. There is an artist in each of us to the extent that we struggle to keep our brains from compressing our experience. Art is a choice. It is a fight against complacency. It is a decision to forge a life that’s richer, more uncomfortable, more mind-blowing, more uncertain. And ultimately, more beautiful.” — Bianca Bosker

2/15/2024: “Painting in oils and acrylics is a way to express and exhibit the beautiful colors that I see on a day-to-day basis, whether it's hearing someone's name or that song on the radio. I paint a variety of artists from Led Zeppelin to Stevie Wonder.” — Melissa S. McCracken

2/14/2024: “…so much contemporary art is dedicated to questioning what’s contemporary art that the debate has largely devolved into a self-licking ice cream cone.” — Bianca Bosker

2/13/2024: “The paint is a much better artist than I am, and almost always does something more interesting than anything I could invent.” — Nicholas Simmons

2/12/2024: “The paint has a skin to it, here taut and glossy, there wrinkled, abraded, scarred. It is pierced, abraded, scraped. A line drawn through it will go through half a dozen states, from the furry bloom of crusted charcoal to a blind furrow, cutting a channel in to soft paint below.” — Andrew Forge, speaking about Willem de Kooning’s paintings

2/11/2024: “As a rule, someone who has difficulty with painting in any medium is not prepared to believe that the real trouble is ignorance of drawing and composition.” — William Herring

2/10/2024: "Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid." — Salvador Dali

2/9/2024: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” — Aristotle

2/8/2024: “Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” — Bill Moyers

2/7/2024: “Creative work is a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.” — Steven Pressfield

2/6/2024: “If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.” – Albrecht Dürer

2/5/2024: “Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.” — Marc Chagall

2/4/2024: “In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

2/3/2024: “Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.” — Henri Matisse

2/2/2024: “To me, surrealism is a way to approach the canvas as though it is a doorway into realms unknown -- painting pathways to our dreams as we seek the unknowable possibilities of our temporal existence.” — Mac

2/1/2024: “The first virtue of a painting is that it be a feast for the eyes.” — Eugene Delacroix

1/31/2024: “Composition is the gravity that holds a painting together.” — Frank Webb

1/30/2024: “A good painter needs only three colors: black, white and red.” — Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)

1/29/2024: “I embrace realism and representative form as a way to transform ordinary scenes into extraordinary revelations of the human experience." — Mac

1/28/2024: “It's hard to see things when you are too close. Take a step back and look." — Bob Ross

1/27/2024: “The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Some are just average-looking old people. But event he plainest face ‘is so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably’”. — David Brooks

1/25/2024: “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.” — Paul Klee

1/24/2024: “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” — Auguste Rodin

1/23/2024: "You can't teach an artist much how to paint, you can tell him what not to do, but if he has any ability, it will work out." — Thomas Moran

1/21/2024: “See the first stroke as a start and everything after that a recovery.” — Nathan Oliveira

1/20/2024: “Painting is like romance, since it is all about seeing, feeling, and interpreting.” — Andrew McDermott

1/19/2024: “The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.” — Queen Margrethe II

1/18/2024: “Paint every day.” — Irwin Greenberg (and about every other artist who ever lived…)

1/17/2024: “I paint with shapes.” — Alexander Calder

1/16/2024: In order to be an artist, you do not need to ‘live like an artist’ — you just need to do your art. It might be painting, or pastries, or plumbing, but it has nothing to do with persuading others that you are an artist. — Mac

1/15/2024: “Composition is my delight, my pain, my longing, my humor, my temptation and fear expressed. When it works well, it reaches beyond myself to the viewer who relates personally, who finds their own metaphor.” — Nancy Slaght

1/14/2024: “The relationships of shape, texture, and color all contribute to the creative action that gradually becomes the expressive concept.” — Marilyn Hughey Phillis

1/13/2024: "If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!" — Marcel Duchamp

1/12/2024: "There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other." — Paul Cezanne

1/11/2024: "Exactitude is not truth." — Henri Matisse

1/10/2024: “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” — Vincent Van Gogh

1/9/2024: (A Loooong one today): “Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn.” — Giorgio de Chirico

1/8/2024: “The composition gets strengthened by adding lines that don't exist in nature. That language has much more impact than a literal painting. The beautiful 'composed' scene, which follows the invented lines, talks to us.” — Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki

1/7/2024: “The brush is a more powerful and rapid tool than the point or stump.” — Thomas Eakins

1/6/2024: “Visual art is necessary for a democracy to rightly function as it intends to influence, critique, and propel civic agendas and priorities by and for the general public. Democracy is not meant to stay static. On the contrary, for a democracy to function, it must continue to grow and adapt to the needs of the people. Art is a powerful tool for a democracy to rightly function.” — Angela Irene Hefka

1/4/2024: “When fashion sweeps in, artists follow suit. I think this is the malady of contemporary art.” — Gao Xingjian

1/3/2024: "The New Year is a blank canvas. Embrace it with the passion of an artist, ready to fill it with the vibrant colors of endless possibilities." — Mac

1/2/2024: “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery”. — Francis Bacon

1/1/2024: “Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.” — Al Hirschfeld

12/31/2023: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” — Aristotle

12/30/2023: “The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was “beauty.” The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile.” — Roger Scruton

12/29/2023: “An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” — Charles Horton Cooley

12/28/2023: “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

12/26/2023: “The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we’re a part.” — President Ronald Reagan

12/25/2023: "Art is the mistletoe that hangs in the doorway between the tangible and the ethereal, inviting all who enter to share in the magic of imagination." — ChatGPT (when prompted to make up quotes about creating art which also reference Christmas…)

12/24/2023: “Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.” — Paul Klee

12/23/2023: “The ability to see, one's perception of life all around, is what has awakened in me through painting, as well as a constant discovery of what art is - learning to see beauty in everything." — Jil Ashton-Leigh

12/22/2023: "I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death." — Leonardo da Vinci

12/21/2023: “I have had three masters, Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt.” — Francisco Goya

12/20/2023: "I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers." — Claude Monet

12/19/2023: "I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint." — Michelangelo

12/18/2023: “I don't paint so that people will understand me, I paint to show what a particular scene looks like.” — J. M. W. Turner

12/15/2023: “The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting….” — Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)

12/14/2023: “Talent! There's no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way.” — Winslow Homer

12/13/2023: “A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.” — Oscar Wilde

12/12/2023: “I’ve never wanted to make art that speaks only to an art-literate audience. Like, I’m not interested in hard-core abstraction or really conceptual art. I’m not interested in photorealistic painting. I like complex ideas, but a lot of art can be self-referential, and I just think that is so boring” — Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

12/11/2023: “Artists are here to disturb the peace.” — James Baldwin

12/7/2023: “My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.” — Peter Falk

12/6/2023: “I go through a love-hate relationship with most of my paintings when they are finished... The best cure I have found... is to just get on with another painting.” — Leoni Duff

12/3/2023: “Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment. — Sam Francis

11/30/2023: “In painting I want to say something comforting in the way that music is comforting.” — Vincent van Gogh

11/29/2023: “Don't paint the apple; paint the red.” — Arthur Lismer

11/28/2023: “When you go out to paint try to forget what object you have before you - a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it emerges as your own naïve impression of the scene before you.” — Claude Monet

11/27/2023: “I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.” —Robert Redford

11/26/2023: “I take art, to include my art, very seriously — however, I try very hard not to take myself too seriously.” — Mac

11/25/2023: "People don't understand we're the only country in the world that thinks art is a luxury. Everyone else in the world understands that art is an essential part of the quality of life." — Steven van Zandt

11/24/2023: “The arts are what makes life worth living. You’ve got food, you’ve got shelter, yeah. But the things that make you laugh, make you cry, make you connect, make you love are communicated through the arts. They aren’t extras.” — President Barack Obama

11/23/2023: "A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light." — Henri Matisse

11/22/2023: “Keep painting - day in - day out. Be absorbed by it.” — Milton Avery

11/21/2023: -letter to patron Don Antonio Ruffo, November 13, 1649... “I have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found... that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way.” — Artemesia Gentileschi

11/20/2023: “I find a single focus in the scene and then play everything off that one thing.” — Kenn Backhaus

11/19/2023: “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” ― Georgia O'Keefe

11/18/2023: “Use diagonals to draw your eye in. Diagonals are the ‘porn’ of art.” — Seth Roby

11/17/2023: "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." — Edgar Degas

11/15/2023: “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” – Stella Adler

11/14/2023: “Keep good company - that is, go to the Louvre.” — Paul Cezanne

11/13/2023: "The best artist has that thought alone - Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone." — Michelangelo

11/12/2023: “I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.” — Andre Kertesz

11/11/2023: “I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.” — Francis Bacon

11/10/2023: “When making a painting, only one thing counts: what you do next.” — Darby Bannard

11/9/2023: “I was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.” — Prince (now King) Charles, on painting (He’s an accomplished painter)

11/8/2023: "Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation." — Salvador Dali

11/7/2023: "He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." — Leonardo da Vinci

11/6/2023: “Everything we paint is a statement about ourselves.” — Mark Davis

11/5/2023: “If you think your paintings aren’t good enough, ask yourself, ‘good enough for…whom?’. Better yet, ask a friend. The affirmation will be good for your soul. — Mac

11/3/2023: “In painting, detail for the sake of itself is useless. It must have relevance to the whole.” — Ken Danby

11/2/2023: "How much time does a piece of art take? 'A lifetime,' is one answer. You got to this exact point today in which you made a piece of work that you would not have made on any other day previously. It took all of your experience, all of your mistakes, and all of your experiments to get to this one moment in time." — Anna Brones

11/1/2023: "Strain your brain more than your eye... You can copy a thing to a certain limit. Then you must use intellect.” — Thomas Eakins

10/31/2023: “I don't know the difference between a warm color and a cool one.” — Charles dMarion Russell

10/30/2023: “I embrace the middle ground, because curiously it has more edge to it than the cutting edge. It has been a weirdly neglected path for the audience of contemporary art. I'm making art not for people who don't like art, but for people who are interested but maybe alienated by the more esoteric pieces” — Grayson Perry

10/29/2023: “My first memory is of light -- the brightness of light -- light all around.” — Georgia O'Keefe

10/28/2023: "I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.” — Claude Monet

10/27/2023: "Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop." — Michelangelo

10/26/2023: “Paintings are loopholes of escape to the soul.” — Van Waldron

10/25/2023: “Painting is much like fishing. Sometimes we get hits and sometimes we get a glimpse of the phantom of the deep. Sometimes we sit adrift. But sooner or later, we get a keeper.” — Paul Allen Taylor

10/24/2023: “I tell young people that the greatest paintings in museums are made with minerals mixed in oil schmeared on cloth with the hair from the back of a pig's ear. It's that simple.” — James Rosenquist

10/22/2023: “The canvas upon which the artist paints is the spectator's mind.” — Kakuzo Okakura

10/19/2023: “I paint because I like to paint. I have no theories.” — Jean-Paul Lemieux

10/18/2023: “I've always thought of painting as some kind of gift. And as a gift, there is a duty that comes with it: to push painting as far as you can. Artists serve society simply by producing a good painting. And that's the hardest thing in the world. People think it's a lark. It's not.” — Sonia Getchoff

10/17/2023: “Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbor.” — Giotto di Bondone

10/16/2023: “Paint like nobody is watching and paint like you don't need any money.” — John Ferrie

10/15/2023: “All painting is an expression of isolation. Only when I allow others inside the studio do I become social - my canvas becomes my mask, my deception and prison.” — Kris Courtney

10/12/2023: "It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory." -- Edgar Degas

10/11/2023: You shall worry not about “being of your time”, for you are your time, and it is brief. — Frederick Frank (from his “10 Commandments of Drawing)

10/10/2023: “Realtors preach - 'Location, Location, Location,' while artists should preach - 'Composition, Composition, Composition.'“ — Doug Mays

10/9/2023: "Art is never finished, only abandoned." -- Leonardo da Vinci

10/8/2023: "With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public." -- Paul Cezanne

10/3/2023: “My job is to paint what I see, not what I know.” — J. M. W. Turner

10/2/2023: "I decided very young that I would be an American painter. I travelled the country over, and the West appealed to me. There is no phase of landscape in which we are not richer, more varied and interesting than any other country in the world." — Thomas Moran

10/1/2023: “A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not." — Leonardo da Vinci

9/30/2023: “Art is love! Painting is the most joyful, the most absorbing, the most interesting thing I know. It is a positive experience (when I'm not gnashing my teeth in frustration).” — Liz Reday

9/29/2023: “Paintings don't just happen. I am not a proponent of the idea of an artist as someone who kind of magically makes things and has no real control or isn't willfully producing a certain kind of thing. It is labor-intensive, and it is research-intensive. You are making one decision after another, trying to get at something you think is important.” — Kerry James Marshall

9/28/2023: “The activity of painting: a thrilling tussle between the artist's materials and his inspiration... — Mervyn Levy

9/27/2023: “Painting, to me, is a unique experience. Each work is a surprise and has its own personal and intuitive meaning. After brainstorming feelings and memories, each painting evolves freely and independently.” — Fernando Araujo

9/26/2023: “Painting is how the caged soul flies free.” — Stella Violano

9/25/2023: “As a painter we need to take a baby's approach – painting shapes, not things. Painting is putting correct shapes of color notes in the right places.” — Andries Veerman

9/24/2023: “That stroke you are about to make on a painting is as much you as the next word you utter or the next breath you take.” — Harley Brown

9/22/2023: "What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue." -- Henri Matisse

9/21/2023: "An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc." -- Henri Matisse

9/19/2023: "My illustrious lordship, I'll show you what a woman can do." -- Artemisia Gentileschi (Artemisia was an incredible ‘old master’ artist at a time when it was accepted that women couldn’t really paint)

9/17/2023: “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams

9/15/2023: "Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow." -- Kurt Vonnegut

9/14/2023: “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London

9/13/2023: “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” – Pablo Picasso

9/10/2023: “The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.” — Bertrand Russell

9/8/2023: "Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do." -- Edgar Degas

9/6/2023: “Turn yourself into a madman and let yourself go wild with paint. Don't think about it, evaluate it, or judge it. Just paint.” — Elizabeth Winter-Noyes

9/4/2023: “Painters will tell you they are transported whenever they paint. The time just flies. It's the combination of having to concentrate, and yet enjoy at a deep level the application of colours to canvas. It's sensual, and addictive.” — Brian Crawford Young

9/3/2023: “What can I do to my composition to make it say more? There is no wrong time in the planning process to ask this question, and the creative thought can come at any moment. — Tom Huntley

9/2/2023: “Color is a power which directly influences the soul.” ― Wassily Kandinsky

9/1/2023: "These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off." -- Giorgio Vasari

8/31/2023: “Do, or do not. There is no why” — Yoda, about making art

8/30/2023: “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

8/29/2023: “Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.” — Camille Pissarro

8/24/2023: “If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it.” — J. M. W. Turner

8/23/2023: “I think I am beginning to learn something about painting.” — Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)

8/22/2023: “Every artist was first an amateur.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

8/21/2023: "Don't be afraid to try something new. It may turn out as crap... but it's just as likely it will be beautiful." -- Mac

8/20/2023: "The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence." -- Leonardo da Vinci

8/19/2023: "Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind." -- Leonardo da Vinci

8/17/2023: " In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature." -- Giorgio Vasari

8/15/2023: "The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public." -- Paul Gauguin

8/14/2023: "It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way." -- Marcel Duchamp

8/13/2023: “The fact that no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist” — seen on bumper-sticker

8/12/2023: “Talent is a pursued interest. Anything you're willing to practice, you can do" — Bob Ross

8/11/2023: “Do not think that I have stopped painting, for at any moment, I am liable to paint a good picture.” — Winslow Homer

8/10/2023: "In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false." — Edgar Degas

8/7/2023: “To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. So do it.” – Kurt Vonnegut

8/5/2023: “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” — Camille Pissarro

8/3/2023: “It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.” — Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)

8/1/2023: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” — Leonardo da Vinci

(da Vinci began his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, no later than 1506, and worked on it until at least 1517… and apparently considered it unfinished when he died in 1519.)

7/31/2023: “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” — Andy Warhol

7/30/2023: "I prefer winter and fall when you feel the bone structure of the landscape--the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show." — Andrew Wyeth

7/29/2023: “indistinctness is my forte.” — J. M. W. Turner

7/28/2023: "I create art simply because that is what I do... Beyond that, all I want is to sell enough art to be able to afford a little better glass of wine." -- Mac

7/27/2023: “The act of painting is about one heart telling another heart where he found salvation.” — Francisco Goya

7/26/2023: “Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?” — Camille Pissarro

7/25/2023: “The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” –- Paul Strand

7/24/2023: “It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.” ― Georgia O'Keeffe

7/23/2023: "I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." — Vincent van Gogh

7/20/2023: “Art is the stored honey of the human soul.” — Theodore Dreiser

7/19/2023: “To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.” — J. M. W. Turner

7/18/2023: "It has often occurred to me as a curious and anomalous fact, that American artists are prone to seek the subject for their art in foreign lands, to the almost entire exclusion of their own." — Thomas Moran

7/17/2023: "If you display yourself completely, all your inner soul disappears. You have to keep something to your imagination, to yourself." — Andrew Wyeth

7/16/2023: "Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world." — Edward Hopper

7/14/2023: “Creativity is intelligence having fun” — Albert Einstein

7/13/2023: “You can’t use up creativity. The more the you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou

7/12/2023: “Art is a line around your thoughts.” – Gustav Klimt

7/10/2023: “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

7/9/2023: “A good artist has less time than ideas.” – Martin Kippenberger

7/8/2023: "I dream of painting and then I paint my dream." — Vincent van Gogh

7/7/2023: “We want happy paintings. Happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news.” — Bob Ross

7/6/2023: ““If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.” ― Georgia O'Keefe

7/5/2023: "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." — Vincent van Gogh

7/4/2023: “I love contemporary art, although I wouldn't want a pickled shark in my house” -- Bruno Tonioli

(in reference to Damian Hirst's artwork "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", which is literally a preserved tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde)

7/3/2023: “All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was ‘now’” -- James Turrell

7/2/2023: “Let your eyes dictate what you paint.  Follow what intrigues you, and do that.  Paint whatever really grabs you – because what you are passionate about shows.” — Cliff Rossberg

7/1/2023: “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents” — Bob Ross [a bit of context: In one of Bob Ross's “the Joy of Painting” (JoP) videos, he somehow leaves an accidental dark mark near the top of the canvas, in the sky… which he then decides to make into a bird, explaining with this quote. A popular meme "Ever make mistakes in life? Let's make them birds. Yeah, they're birds now." is apparently not an actual quote from “JoP”, although it’s certainly a good pearl of wisdom.]

tword the top of the canvas. He then decides to make that mark into a bird, and makes a comment about not making mistakes, but having happy accidents.

6/30/2023: “What’s called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I’ve become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.” — Art Spiegelman

6/29/2023: “If you’re “challenging the viewer” by confronting them with an image which makes them uncomfortable or which causes them to think deeply, you may have a point… but if you’re “challenging the viewer” by leaving them unable to figure out what the heck your work is about, you’re probably serving up bovine excrement.” — Mac

6/29/2023: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you're not going to make an awful lot of work.” ― Chuck Close

6/28/2023: “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” — Pablo Picasso

6/27/2023: “If you make art, you are an artist” (attribution unknown, but it’s all over social media)…. Mac’s corollary: “If you do not make art, then no matter how much you may feel like you are, you are not an artist.”

6/25/2023: "The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity." - Alberto Giacometti.

6/22/2023: “We can teach our children to read and write, but without the arts, what will there be for them to read or write?” — paraphrase of Minnetonka MN school parents for the arts, as relayed by Monica Grable

6/20/2023: “Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

6/14/2023: “Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.” — Yayoi Kusama

6/13/2023: “Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.” — Frida Kahlo

6/5/2023: “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” — Edward Hopper

6/4/2023: “Painting is not a profession; it’s a casino” —Mac

6/3/2023: “Ancora imparo” (a Latin phrase which translates to “I am still learning”) —Michelangelo's last words.

6/2/2023: “For a work to inspire questions is legitimate, but a work which requires answers indicates an artist who has failed his medium.” — Mac

Art quotes

Quotes by artists

Artist quotes

Quotes about art

daily art quote

Art quote of the day

good quotes for artists

“art quote of the day”

art quotes

“art quotes”

#artquote

#artquoteoftheday

#artistquotes

#art quotes

#art quote of the day

#quotesaboutart

#artistquotes