Artist Quotes - Page 202

I have plenty of enemies... among artists who resent my earning a living. They think I should go off and starve while painting something 'significant.

I feel very grateful that for some reason I was raised to believe that I had permission to explore the creative world. I'm very aware of what a privilege that is, because most people don't grant themselves that permission, and I really think that's the only thing that separates people that call themselves artists from the rest of the world. It's suspending self-judgment for long enough to do something expressive.

So must the artist do in working at the nude.

All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.

I just think you can't shut your life off to just, you know, one thing. You gotta be open-minded. Explore things. Feed your artist.

Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.

What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

A friend of mine says his two favorite artists are Picasso and Rembrandt. Picasso because he paints the beautiful in such an ugly fashion. And Rembrandt because he paints the ugly so beautifully.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

The worst thing that can happen to you as an artist is for you to lose faith in yourself.

I like to work with artists from around the world. There are so many new inspiring filmmakers. I had the privilege recently to work with Ethiopian filmmaker Zeresenay Mehari and his wife on the film Difret. They are that unique balance of very thoughtful conscious filmmakers who are also brilliant, original artists.

It's great to jump into things you're not sure of and you haven't done and that are a little scary. That's what we have to do, as artists.

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

We singer-songwriter people, we're used to getting up and doing our own thing in front of people, and we're it. We're the band, artist, writer, producer, front man. We're the whole thing. You develop, it's not smugness, but this self-reliance, that can limit your creativity. When you're willing and able to invite others into it, you wind up getting a piece of work that's bigger and better than anything you ever imagined it could be.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.

Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.

A lot of stuff you hear on the radio is like instant hooky pop, but I can't imagine it being covered in the future by other artists. It's really for themselves.

I discovered that it was a lonely world being a solo artist. Then I started working with another solo artist, Rod Stewart, and he used to tell me how lonely he was!

The great artists represent you. The great products represent you. They don't tell you who you are. But with them, you require less verbiage.

There's this privileged position of being an artist where you can do things on a more experimental nature simply to see what happens.

My parents are artists, so I grew up with my mom having bonfires, seven guitars, and talented musicians and artists around like Jack Hirschman.

I was working with real artists [in the Rum Diary], and that's difficult to do and very rare, in this industry, ironically.