“By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.”
Jacques Barzun
But it seems to me that most of the human beings whose lives have stirred us and whom we admire are people who dedicated themselves not to the elementary pleasures, but to something noble, something fine, something that reaches beyond. Some encounter with necessity is the ground of taking one’s life seriously. It’s the ground of being sensitive to all of the really beautiful things in the world. It’s the ground of being open to the call of something higher in which we have a chance to participate, whether it be perpetuation of our young, whether it be the future of our country, whether it be the arts or philosophy or music. And it’s the ground, really, of transforming what is otherwise a mere necessity into an occasion of something really splendidly human.
Leon Kass
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Henry Miller
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
James Baldwin
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chris4d / art #
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art…
…May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt)
Movie: Fight Club
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naelyn / art, experience, music #
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker
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radian / art #
It’s not really art unless someone is winning.
Dogbert
Comic: “Dilbert” by Scott Adams
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naelyn / art, commentary, teachers, teaching #
We must get rid of the talking painters—those who talk but do not paint, who teach in our art schools—and replace them with practicing painters who have proved by their work that they have something to teach.
Henry Hensche - (Feb 25, 1899-1992)
Vincent van Gogh war ein holländischer Maler
Er schnitt sich ab sein linkes Ohr
Das kommt bei Künstlern manchmal vor
Wären alle wie van Gogh
Dann hätten wir ein großes Loch
In der Mitte der Gesellschaft
Dann hätten alle nur ein Ohr
Dann wären alle im Radio
Und keiner säße mehr davor.
Rainald Grebe
Song: Mittelmäßiger Klaus
A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Art is the last of the great cartels.
Banksymus Maximus
What I do for a living is try to make decent sentences, caring about commas and caring about the difference between a proper and a regular noun. What I think about on a daily basis is language, trying to put sentences down that I can live with. As writers, all we have [is] language and nothing else. We’ve got these 26 letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks — that’s it. And out of those 26 letters you can make Ulysses or you can make “Cosmo”. You can make pure crap or you can make great art.
Tim O'Brien
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mumble / art, discworld, humor, random #
Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthusiastic amateur who’d never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man looks at and says, ‘No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.’
Nevertheless, it was beautiful.*



* But not tasteful.
Terry Pratchett
Book: Thief of Time
And my aim in my life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, ‘Oh, the pictures I might have made!’
Vincent van Gogh
The artist is born to be the receptor, the condenser, the transmitter, and the reflector of the aspirations, the desires, and the hopes of his age.
Diego Rivera
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. Chesterton
If I could say it (in) words there would be no reason to paint…
Edward Hopper
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sammyjoe729 / angels, art #
I saw the angel in the marble and I chiseled until I set it free.
Michelangelo
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jacobm / art, work #
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
I have a gift for silence - to show with my body the weight of my soul.
Marcel Marceau - French pantomime (b. 1923)
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt
Mathematics, philosophy, religion, psychology, mysticism, science, art (and the other means of communication), all translate life and existence into their own comprehensible language, but a translation never captures the true essence of what it seeks to translate. Remember that and life can speak without words.
Glen Winterbourne