Artist Quotes - Page 231

The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's not worth thinking about when I'm there. My agenda as an artist doesn't go away when I teach. It actually gets intensified.

Whatever we can do to just give people a sense of hope in the face of what seems like hopelessness. That's a small thing that an artist can do sometimes.

In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.

When I land in a country and they ask for 'occupation,' I always just put 'artist.' I think that covers all of it.

As long as artists can make something, artists will continue to survive.

For the most part, it's a world of artists that are very in their own heads.

Financial crisis is the moment of truth for real collectors and true artists.

It's a lot easier to teach someone how to use a computer than it is to teach someone how to be an artist, so we figured if they can animate with a pencil, we can teach them how to animate with a computer.

A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.

It's a very satisfying feeling for everyone involved into giving bands a new life - for me, the artists, and the audience.

I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.

Little did the artist know, who neglected his appearance in favor of his work, that the years would produce a breed that spent hours meticulously acquiring a neglected look to appear like an artist.

The primary dues a writer or any artist pays is to remain sentient, and to forfeit the illusionary luxury of such anesthetics as avoidance, numbness, and denials.

All the time I'm changing as an artist and as a person.

Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.

In the media, a reviewer has his personal vision but it's passed along to a million readers or whatever. He might think that this particular song sounds like Jo Blow. Or like a Bo Diddley record that he heard six years ago. But the artist who made the record may never have even heard the Bo Diddley song. We all respond differently.

I realized I couldn't get bookings as a performing artist on the road, as it were, I could not make a living in music without going on the road, but I couldn't get booked without a new product. People say, "Where's your new album?" Well, I have no new album, and I'm not going to have a new album. They said, "What are you doing?" I'm performing music that I've done my entire life that I've never performed, and I'm promoting material that I haven't promoted.

Well, to me, the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of daring-do, self reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value.

Artists are interested in pictures as sources of ideas for their work. Where the pictures come from and how they are made is of little concern to them.

The overscaled compositions being produced by so many abstract painters, which are full of movement and use of color, are ideal example, ideal transformations of an entire wall and entire room.... There is no denying that one of the major attractions of these successful large compositions is their structural decorative use in the contemporary scene... That these large canvases can be superbly decorative may not be considered complimentary by some of the artists involved.

When I talk about music in Memphis, it's a place you can go if you are a beginning artist or anywhere in your career, and you can incubate.

Life is like Avant Garde. It will make you uncomfortable, and leave the room. But always remember to come back and watch the artist bow.

Work always gives me an opportunity to grow as an artist and a person.

I believe artists should be able to step into other people's situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don't have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies?

Artists who are relevant today won't be tomorrow unless someone does the right thing by their character and preserves it in the dialogue of a movie.