Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ben Shahn

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

Ben Shahn

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

Ben Shahn

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.

Ben Shahn

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

Ben Shahn

Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

Bat for Lashes

I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification. And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

Barbara Goldsmith

I am guilty of using dollar signs as proof of a work of art's longevity.

Barbara Goldsmith

Throughout history, self-styled arbiters have taken it upon themselves to decide the question of what can or cannot be the legitimate purview of art.

Barbara Hepworth

Body experience... is the centre of creation.

Barbara Hepworth

My works are an imitation of my own past and present.

Barbara Hepworth

All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.

Barbara Hepworth

At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution.

Barbara Hepworth

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Barbara de Angelis

Don't be proud of what you know, and don't be self-confident if you are learned. Be open to advice from the unlearned as well as from the learned. Art knows no limit, and the artists will never achieve perfection.

Avery Brundage

For too long the world has failed to recognise that the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement are about fine athletics and fine art.

Avery Brooks

If I were a carpenter, I'd find a way to empower using that skill. I'm using as much as God has given - my mind, my voice, my heart, my art forms. This is the highest form of expression on the planet from God, to me, to you.

The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

That art is best which suggests most.

Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.

Art is one of man's few serious activities.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.

The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.

Ashley Madekwe

Nude nail polish wins hands down over intricate nail art.

Ashley Greene

When I was growing up, I cheered and danced and ran and stuff like that. I'm probably thinner now than I was in high school. I had a lot of muscle - a LOT of muscle in high school. When I was a kid I did marshal arts, and then I did all-star crazy competitive cheer and dance, and then I swam so I was very muscular. You know, healthy, but not quite as thin as I am.

Ashley Greene

I have a martial arts background and I'm very athletic. So I think if I can find a film where a female is a badass in it - that would just be amazing. They are sometimes hard to find, but I definitely want to do something like that.

Arthur Boyd

Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do.

Arthur Boyd

If I was whisked away... I think I could put up with anything, except not seeing the Australian landscape. It would be a torture to have it cut off.

Berthold Auerbach

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.