Portal:The arts/Quote archive

Former quotes at Art Wikiportal

2005

May

Art is the triumph over chaos.
 —John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
 —Marc Chagall

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
 —Vincent Van Gogh

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
 —Robert Motherwell

A painting is never finished. It simply stops in an interesting place.
 —Paul Gardener

June

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
 —Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1897)

"Art is a dream like no other" by alexander anderson 1998-

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
 —Jean Cocteau

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.
 —Louise Bourgeois

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
     —Edward Hopper

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
   —Edgar Degas

July

I hate flowers — I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
   —Georgia O'Keeffe

Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?
    —Marcel Duchamp to Constantin Brancusi at a 1912 exhibition of aviation technology.

If only people knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures.
    —Sir Edwin Landseer

The people who call my work 'abstract' are imbeciles; that which they call 'abstract' is the purest realism, whose reality is not represented by exterior form but by the idea behind it, the essence of the work.
    —Constantin Brancusi

August

Good painters imitate nature; bad ones spew it up.
    —Miguel de Cervantes

September

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.
    —Eric Gill

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
    —Francis Bacon

December

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

2006

January

A good rough test [[of a work of art] is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life.

Bernard Berenson
May


Franklin Delano Roosevelt
September
Patricia Govezensky

2007

July


Sybil Andrews

2008

August


September
October
December

2009

January