Poliakoff Art Quotes

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. ~ Robert Hughes

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood. ~ Katherine Paterson

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit. ~ Ansel Adams

I don't want to sit there and be like, 'Oh, I don't care what the audience thinks.' It does matter to me. I just want them to think, to be honest. ~ Donald Glover

Clyde Phillip Wachsberger's delightful memoir about tending beds of flowers as compensation for a lonely middle age only to find unexpected romance along the way is a sweet reminder that, as he puts it, 'anything can happen in a garden.' In prose that balances candor with perfect courtesy, he charms us with the message that keeping a garden with a beloved companion, this most ephemeral of all the arts, can bring us the most enduring joys and pleasures. ~ Philip Gambone

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere. ~ Tom Turner

We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That's how art works. It's never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It's the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We've got to be patient enough to wait for them. ~ Pat Conroy

We first create in the mind, then the hands. But we stop creating if there is no heart. ~ Richie Norton

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne. ~ Ambrose Bierce

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in. ~ Katherine Paterson

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. ~ Kingsley Amis

I hope for all of us that the future brings us towards evolving our consciousness. To delving deeper into our true power. To exploring more the key to sustaining our planet and our art for the better of all living things. ~ Rain Phoenix

If you don't care about losing, you will focus on technique. ~ Caio Terra

I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environments, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savouring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savour these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the ~ Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of giving priority to the decisive theatre. There is a lot in this. But in war this principle, like all others, is governed by facts and circumstances; otherwise strategy would be too easy. It would become a drill-book and not an art; it would depend upon rules and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of the proportions of an ever-changing scene. ~ Winston S. Churchill

But it must not be forgotten that ... glass and porcelain were manufactured, stuffs dyed and metals separated from their ores by mere empirical processes of art, and without the guidance of correct scientific principles. ~ Justus Von Liebig

The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence ... I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality ... But I've always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones. I don't see how the "lies" we write and the "lies" we live can or should be divided. They are seamless, one canvas, for me. While we live we can keep them apart, but not command the future to do the same. The outrage some Thomas Hardy fans have shown over all the revelations about the private man seems to me hypocritical in the extreme. They hugely enrich our understanding of him ... I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them - and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.
(Letter to Jo Jones, September 15, 1980, arguing for the preservation of John Collier's personal papers) ~ John Fowles

I begrudge making a career out of clothes, but Lyndon likes bright colors and dramatic styles that do the most for one's figure, and I try to please him," she was to say. "I've really tried to learn the art of clothes, because you don't sell for what you're worth unless you look well. ~ Robert A. Caro

The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art. ~ Robert Gottlieb

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. ~ John Barth

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

And can you mention any pursuit of mankind in which the male sex has not all these gifts and qualities in a higher degree than the female? Need I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the management of pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be great, and in which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the most absurd? You are quite right, he replied, in maintaining the general inferiority of the female sex: although many women are in many things superior to many men, yet on the whole what you say is true. And ~ Plato

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. ~ Thomas Mann

The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

It rendeth my heart. Better than thy words express it, thine eyes tell me all thy danger. As yet thou art not free; thou still SEEKEST freedom. Too unslept hath thy seeking made thee, and too wakeful. On the open height wouldst thou be; for the stars thirsteth thy soul. But thy bad impulses also thirst for freedom. Thy ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. ~ Claude Debussy

I am tired, I want to go home. I want to continue my art work, I want to plant a garden, I want to walk in the forest, I want to walk in the fields, I just want to lie down on the grass and feel the sun against my skin. I want to be able to hold my family close to me and not have someone tell me time's up. ~ Leonard Peltier

The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities. ~ Gertrude Atherton

Your cameras can't control the minds of those who know, that you'll even sell your soul just to get a story sold. ~ Michael Jackson

I will burn your life to the ground and call it art. ~ Unknown

Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star. ~ Art Spiegelman

A finished product is one that has already seen its better days. ~ Art Linkletter

Dear Nancy,
I love your book The Crystal Navigator. You paint beautiful imagery throughout the pages of the story, and I loved learning about art through the adventures of Lucy. I'm honored to be one of the first readers of your wonderful story,
Sincerely,
Sylvie" (11 years old) ~ Sylvie

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced - and enriched - at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom," "liberty," and "free speech" have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well). ~ Victor Davis Hanson

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent. ~ Philip K. Dick

Just another point of view, I'm just a reflection of you. ~ Bootsy Collins

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love. ~ Marc Chagall

The thing about being an artist," Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, "is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it does about you and your art. Trust me. ~ Leila Sales

Famously contemptuous of the art of photography, Marcel Proust, of all men, would have understood that the face I am seeking is in the end unfixable. People never stop changing position in relation to us. In the imperceptible but incessant movement of the world, we regard them as immobile in an instant of vision too brief for us to notice the moment which is propelling them. But we have only to select from our memories two pictures of them taken at different times, but similar enough for them not to change in themselves, at least not perceptibly and the difference between the two pictures is a gauge of the displacement they have undergone in relation to us. Even the dead are not immobile and dreams pay no homage to the absurd waking-myth of fixity. ~ Gail Jones

Philosophy? What good is that?" Isn't it the art of saying nothing with as many words as possible? ~ Brandon Sanderson

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will. ~ John Baldessari