Ringstrom Artist Quotes

Being an artist is not exactly the most universally respected, or secure thing to do with your life. It can be frightening and you can feel that you're taking a lot of risks just with your own life, and your family's security. But the rewards outweigh those things. ~ Joan Osborne

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar. ~ Theodor Mommsen

Lately, some nights, before falling asleep, Marina tries out some of the affirmations suggested by her therapist. She tends to stop after a minute because she struggles saying the same thing over and again, and all too soon the affirmations turn into something else entirely.

'I am a beautiful and productive woman; I am an artist. I am a fruitful and defective woman; I am an artiste. I am a fearful and resentful zoo-man; I am a sadist. I am a dutiful representative of batshit; I am batshit, I am zoo shit. I am a fruity loopy arsonist. ~ Laia Jufresa

I'm an artist - not a 'woman artist' not an 'American artist.'"8 ~ Gail Levin

You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art. Philip ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The thing is, about a character, it's not about being right, it's about the truth. The truth comes from within, so you have to search as an artist for the truth. ~ Russell Hornsby

There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on. ~ David Bowie

The artist speaks with inspiring tools of creativity. Thinkers challenge with the weapons of choice. These two forces are necessary to move souls beyond limitation. ~ T.F. Hodge

Do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation ~ Vladimir Nabokov

To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions. ~ Robert Irwin

If you are adding another beauty to a beauty, then you have a soul of an artist! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting. ~ John Cage

I like rap. I like anything with soul. I like anything you can feel, anything that makes you think that the artist had to make that song, or they were going to go crazy. ~ Banks

The artist is chosen by God to fulfill his commands and must never be overwhelmed by public opinion. ~ Albrecht Durer

My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook - I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing - I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm - I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt's portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm 19 years old. I think I'm doing a pretty good job ... Basically from my heart I really just want to say it really should be about to music. It should be about the craft that I'm making. This is not a gimmick and I'm an artist and I should be taken seriously. ~ Justin Bieber

It's such a weird self-confidence that an artist has - to conceive of this thing that serves no function and say, 'I'm going to really work hard for it and give it and it's just going to matter to people.' You really have to believe it all on your own. ~ Dan Colen

As artists, we do the work that we do. Receiving an award or not receiving an award in no way diminishes one's talent or value. ~ Phylicia Rashad

Dawn is about luminosity and so is the iPhone ... The little drawings of the dawn are done while I'm still in bed ... If you're in my kind of business you'd be a fool to sleep through that ... Artists can't work office hours, can they? ~ David Hockney

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument
a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself
in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The true Martial Artist is not the one who fears change, but the one who causes it to happen. ~ Ed Parker

An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

We are part of each other and part of something bigger than our own egos. An artist should ... bring into the world some vision. Dancers should ask, "What is their work in the service of?" ~ Bill T. Jones

Artists don't like the business side. None of us were born understanding money. We all had to learn how to do it. So it's just something creative people need to get familiar with ... not really so scary. ~ Adam Leipzig

The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance. ~ Henri Matisse

I love acting in the theater,but I'm fascinated with acting on film. If it's a film or a play or whatever, if the writing is good and you really feel passionate about it, you just can't lose. You'll grow from it. Whether it's a success or not is neither here nor there; you're going to grow as an artist from this experience. ~ Jonathan Groff

The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are… The Promethean task of the powerful is to remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist - an artist creating yourself. ~ Robert Greene

The artists who have inspired me the most in my life are the ones who have really had something to say and stand up for. That, to me, is part of being an artist-having the voice to express things that need to be verbalized and brought to light. Unfortunately, I don't think that's a priority for people, because the few artists who do have the nerve to take a stand for what they believe get shut down in a way. ~ Alicia Keys

I think every artist strives for a record that crosses all energy, lines, boundaries or languages or barriers. ~ Estelle

Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Whenever I wrote songs - particularly back then - it would always be for a particular artist. ~ Allen Toussaint

All artists are entrepreneurs. All entrepreneurs are artists. ~ Seth Godin

I mean everything's a lot more smoother. It's just calm. IN the beginning, I had the typical attitude of a young rapper makin money ... ya know I was the partyin guy ... I was the guy wit the girls ... all the extra that came wit the game ... it's up to the artist to know when to say when. You can't live that kind of lifestyle forever ... I learn from the other people's mistake. I know when to say no. You learn to make the right decisions and pick the right choices. That's all that's really changed. ~ The Notorious B.I.G.

What I consider to be the barometer for what is a rock artist and what is not, is somebody who has a certain element of blues, even a hint of soul or blues music, derivative of African-American blues, folk, spiritual, or gospel. ~ Ian Astbury

Music is art, and once you become an artist, you need to learn how to accept criticism. ~ Yanni

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves. ~ Marcel Duchamp

Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in Artforum next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renee Zellweger - moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one - was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception - the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness - but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renée Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang's videos and ~ Michael Cunningham

I feel totally female. I didn't compete with men and I don't want to look like a man! I love being a lady and dressing up and masquerading and wearing all the fineries. I'm breaking down the idea that the artist has to look poor, with berets. ~ Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot - or will not - achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography. ~ Roland Barthes

There was nothing conservative about Adolf Hitler. Hitler was an artist and a revolutionary at heart. He wanted to completely upend and remake German society. ~ A.E. Samaan

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely. ~ Arthur Erickson

Coming tight was boring to me, just the face ... it didn't have enough information. ~ Annie Leibovitz

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men. ~ George Henry Lewes

The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the artist has set for himself. ~ Odilon Redon

As you follow the escapades or the journey of the hero through a story, it evokes some kind of emotion in the viewers. The director's job is to make sure that the audience goes through the journey and has an emotional reaction. ~ Don Bluth

Let us seek the respite where it is - in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all. ~ Albert Camus