Visual Art Quotes

Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. ~ Douglas Coupland

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty? ~ Paul Gauguin

There is a satire that exists in 'My Arm,' but there is also an honoring of some of the stronger ideas that I've raided from visual art. ~ Tim Crouch

Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Beyonce is such a visual artist. This was just trying to figure out another side to her that could be fun and young and exciteful and a great video. ~ Bryce Wilson

Taming the matter is the basic thing for creating visual art. ~ David Berkowitz Chicago

I don't think music is the first thing I turn to. For me, I think visual art is more the thing. Sometimes when I've been doing music for a while, I can't really take any more in. ~ Bat For Lashes

Music is a spiritual doorway its power comes from the fact that it plugs directly into the soul, unlike a lot of visual art or textual information that has to go through the more filtering processes of the brain. ~ Peter Gabriel

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal. ~ Steven Pinker

I am able to write musically about the visual. I can pick up tones, I can pick up themes. And I find visual art is a wonderful launching-off place. ~ Lawrence Weschler

Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower. ~ Ryan Kavanaugh

There are many ways in which people are made aware of their power to believe in the supremacy of Divine guidance and power: through music or visual art, some event or experience decisively influencing their life, looking through a microscope or telescope, or just by looking at the miraculous manifestations or purposefulness of Nature. ~ Ernst Boris Chain

Whether it is Bach or Mozart that we hear in church, we have a sense in either case of what gloria Dei, the glory of God, means. The mystery of infinite beauty is there and enables us to experience the presence of God more truly and vividly than in many sermons. But there are already signs of danger to come. Subjective experience and passion are still held in check by the order of the musical universe, reflecting as it does the order of the divine creation itself. But there is already the threat of invasion by the virtuoso mentality, the vanity of technique, which is no longer the servant of the whole but wants to push itself to the fore. During the nineteenth century, the century of self-emancipating subjectivity, this led in many places to the obscuring of the sacred by the operatic. The dangers that had forced the Council of Trent to intervene were back again. In similar fashion, Pope Pius X tried to remove the operatic element from the liturgy and declared Gregorian chant and the great polyphony of the age of the Catholic Reformation (of which Palestrina was the outstanding representative) to be the standard for liturgical music. A clear distinction was made between liturgical music and religious music in general, just as visual art in the liturgy has to conform to different standards from those employed in religious art in general. Art in the liturgy has a very specific responsibility, and precisely as such does it serve as a wellspring of culture, which in the final ana ~ Benedict XVI

I began as a boy with artistic talent ... as a visual artist ... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature. ~ Russell Banks

I've never really seen too much difference between writing or making visual art or designing furniture or clothing. It's still my brain - I'm just using different parts of it for different things. ~ Douglas Coupland

Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation ... From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life all movement and rhythm time and light, color and mood in short, all reality in Form and Thought. ~ Hans Hofmann

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. ~ Henri Matisse

Special thanks to Martha Sharpe and everyone at Anansi; to Mandy Barber, for the use of her stunning visual art; to Karen Mac Cormack, for her advice during the early stages of this project; and to David Bromige (weaver of radhats), for his enthusiasm which encouraged me to develop this piece into a book-length poem. ~ Darren Wershler-Henry

How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art. ~ Kermit The Frog

I was thinking about sort of the similarities between "art movies" and lowbrow movies like kitschy sexploitation films. I think they share certain qualities, whether they're hyper-stylized or overly emotive or just very visual. ~ John Waters

I went to an arts school as a kid. We had to take dance every other day, along with drama, music and visual arts. However, wearing black tights was something I dreaded ... and still have nightmares about it to this day. I think I was a pretty good dancer. I suppose that training helped me land parts in musicals ... or has just given me nightmares! ~ Jake Epstein

'Stimela' is the very first video I directed. I wanted it to be an emotional visual art piece, displaying humans as free, powerful animals. We are all running from something or searching for something; our instincts have been ignored. ~ Wynter Gordon

What draws me to theater and religion are these rituals made to make you feel emotion. It's so banal in an interesting way. In visual art it's about making you feel emotional, but it's more subtle. ~ Ragnar Kjartansson

That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that. ~ Andy Serkis

I love visual art. I painted for many years when I was younger. I have studied modern/contemporary Indian art a bit and am very impressed with the talent in India. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Art is a visual language; I'm just perfecting my alphabet. ~ Zachary A. Diaz

While visual art is a thing of timeless beauty, to me, music is so much more. It brings you back to some of the greatest moments in your life. It represents so much more than just noise, it tingles and fills you with feelings. Overwhelms you with emotions of joy or sadness; comfort or anger. Like when you first hear a song that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, made you want to dance, or go out and kick someone's a**. Music is truly a thing of absolute beauty. ~ Jacob Cagnina

Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It's ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art. ~ Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

I would have been a visual artist. When I was in high school, that was one of the things ... I had to make a decision what I was going to go to college for, and at the time, I also painted and sculpted. I got more attention for my performing, so I thought that was a better idea. ~ Josh Young

I just see in pop culture, music, visual art, books, etc., a real hunger for the new and different, and I think that's amazing. Satisfying this hunger is part of the responsibility of a creative person. ~ Porochista Khakpour

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. ~ Titus Burckhardt

Music has always been a part of me and art in general. I love visual art as well. ~ Marketa Irglova

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music. ~ Richard Dawkins

Musically, it's difficult to believe Jim has only two hands and one set of vocal cords. You would think that there were a dozen of him if you closed your eyes and listened. From a visual artist's standpoint, Jim is a man of a thousand faces, all spellbinding. ~ Jeff Mathews

Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language. ~ Julia Glass

As the spiral of modern art history continues to wind down, we can see the increasing demand for tradition in the visual arts. ~ Igor Babailov

It is not my purpose here to document the destruction caused by war [...] The point is to ask ourselves why these accounts have not had greater effect. [...] Why is it that many of us are deeply moved by visual art, fiction, and firsthand accounts of destruction and yet accept war as a means of resolving conflict or defending ourselves? ~ Nel Noddings

I'm really visually stimulated more than anything. I don't really listen to music. I'm more into watching telly or watching movies and visual art. ~ Sia Furler

In visual art it's better once to see, than one hundred times to hear. ~ Igor Babailov

If I want to do something in the TV industry, I should be allowed to explore that, but not in a way where it has to cancel out or ruin my visual art career. ~ Kalup Linzy

If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question. ~ Richard Tuttle

What is art? Art is tar, rearranged. Art is tar on canvas or tar on tarp or tar on a naked body. Art is a bird chirping changed into something visual. Art is an image of a thousand beaks breaking into the office of a quack doctor. I know that doctor, and I've personally spoken to ten of those beaks. Art is rhythm, two hands clapping at a urinal while a third shakes off pee to the beat. Good art stays with you your whole life, especially if that good art is a tattoo. Good art is my name, written backwards, inked on your upper lip in a furry font. Art imitates life, just as life imitates Orafoura. Art can be anything from a Manet to a Monet to a painting of money to a missile. Art can save the world, or devastate it. (We could drop another big bomb on Japan, though I'm not advocating dumping Basquiat paintings on Hiroshima). Art rhymes with a bodily function, and everybody should let their creativity rip everywhere from the privacy of their bathrooms to small heated boxes with four of their closest friends. Art is thinking outside that box, and desperately trying to escape. ~ Jarod Kintz

Be drawn to the visual arts for it can expand your imagination. ~ Barbara Januszkiewicz

The visual arts must communicate to the human spirit, forcing individuals to reflect on themselves and their existence beyond their own self-interest. ~ Dean Mitchell

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part. ~ Douglas Coupland

In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

I collect art books. I have hundreds and hundreds of them and they get me to start hearing things. Sometimes people look at them, but I find that visual art gets me listening, gets me hearing things. ~ Tori Amos

When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me. ~ Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics. ~ Pete Seeger

I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts. ~ Thomas F. Wilson

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors. ~ Dar Williams

Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts. Color, form-all these are the work of Lucifer. ~ Kenneth Anger

God's careful instructions for building the tabernacle in Exodus 31 remind us that his perfection sets the standard for whatever we create in his name. Whatever we happen to make-not only in the visual arts, but in all the arts-we should make it as well as we can, offering God our very best. ~ Philip Graham Ryken

It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art ... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. ~ Clement Greenberg

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

When you're actually making a film, it's just people on your back all the time wanting stuff and you're constantly having to it deal with them. It's probably the most time consuming of all the arts, but I do love it because it is a great mix of visual art and music and writing. ~ Taika Waititi

I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation. ~ J.G. Ballard

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

When I was really young, I gravitated towards the visual arts first. I feel that's what comes most naturally to me. I've always had an immediate proclivity towards making visual art and I was a really tactile kid. ~ John Dyer Baizley

I am a hobbyist photographer so I relate to the visual arts that way, but I'm not a painter. ~ Annie Parisse

Well, as a visual artist working with the phenomenon of cinema, the grammar of cinema, [making a feature] was bound to happen. Everything I do is like sculpting with image and sound. ~ Nicolas Provost

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien. ~ Gavin Bryars

To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku. ~ Frank Horvat

I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything. ~ Lawrence Weschler

An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they? ~ Luhraw

She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art. ~ Duff Brenna

Dirty Freds ... I love this filthy old place. I love the dust and the dirt, the crappy old books and the objects of art. ~ Alan C. Martin

Compared with my brother, I always felt like Richard III, some clever humpbacked thing who surpassed him in the end. He was the one who read books, but I became the writer. He painted and drew, but I was the one who got accepted by the High School of Music and Art. ~ Jerome Charyn

Ut it's one of the reflections of our times. Young minds today are dulled by television and other visual sensations. When reading was one of the few pleasures available, we could recite whole passages to eachother. ~ Gloria Naylor

I guess telling stories is an art. I never looked at it that way. I just started talking, and everyone started laughing. So I kept talking, and they kept laughing. ~ Art Donovan

She (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition. ~ Steven Pressfield

The thing is to live fully, all the time knowing that it could be your last breath. That takes some powerful faith. ~ Art Hochberg

The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately, even though there's pressure to. ~ Daniel Radcliffe

Has it ever happened, you've seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they've done, what they've given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you're happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket ... the actors I see on the screen, they'll get twenty cents of this very dollar I'm paying now; they'll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they're delicious because we see ourselves in glory's mirror. ~ Richard Bach

I've really tried to learn the art of clothes, because you don't sell for what you're worth unless you look good. ~ Lady Bird Johnson

I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half. ~ Molly Crabapple

Berlin was charismatic in the roguish way of a love ... It was a lover who was a little dangerous in ways that didn't always show, keeping you a bit on edge, a bit in love and endlessly forgiving because he made her feel that she was exactly where she was meant to be ... Berlin made you like who you were when you were there, as if everything worth being a part of in the world - all those modern ideas about sex and art and women; all that possibility - was right there, in its dark, beating heart. ~ Whitney Otto

We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both? ~ Oliver Sacks

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry. ~ Patti Smith

Creativity is one of the highest transmissions of love. ~ Suzy Kassem

Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of the Importance of Living is devoted to "the Art of Reading." Lin writes that, "the man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood. ~ Will Schwalbe

There may come a day
Which crowns Desire with gift, and Art with truth,
And Love with bliss, and Life with wiser youth! ~ Bayard Taylor

Artistic creation - in summary - is the desire not to forget. ~ Charlotte M. Bridwell

Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes can see. ~ Vicki Goldberg

The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer. ~ Arthur Koestler

Things that bring out your emotions are what should be in theaters and in books. That's what art is. It makes you feel things. ~ Dominique Swain

I think the consensus among our generation and people younger than us is that we do have a defining challenge in the moment, so I do like being involved in something bigger than the finger-doodling I do in art. It stimulates your brain in certain ways. ~ Edward Norton

To know how to say no to modern excitement was also the condition for the autonomous construction of one's own personality. He that 'does not want to be part of the masses' and did not want to be 'factory goods' was to pay great heed. Certainly, to '"give style" to one's character is a great and rare art', which required an effort of self-discipline from which 'the weak characters with no power over themselves' flinched back. And here Nietzsche appealed to the youth: 'Always continue to become what you are - educator and moulder of yourself'.
To achieve this result, it was necessary never to lose sight of the 'true liberation of life', and to swim against the stream rather than chase blindly and recklessly after the ruling ideologies and myths of an age ruled not 'by living human beings, but instead by publicly opining pseudo-human beings'. No doubt this appeal was part of a reactionary critique of modernity, but that in no way detracted from the charm of this lesson in living and this appeal for autonomy of judgement. ~ Domenico Losurdo

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish. ~ William Osler

And that, I guessed, was the aim of the Lord Chamberlain's Men: to serve up rich helpings of life to their audiences, to introduce them to people they would never otherwise meet, to stretch their minds and heart to fill a greater world. ~ J.B. Cheaney

Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

Cerebration is the enemy of originality in art. ~ Martin Ritt

In life, nothing happens to you. It happens for you. ~ Rorion Gracie

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life. ~ William Morris

One of the aims of Budo is the suppression of fears. ~ Christian Tissier

What further concentration is needed, what added intensity must one's gaze attain, for the brain to enslave the visual image of a person? ~ Vladimir Nabokov

‪Just discovered that creating a recipe is like writing, the art is knowing when to stop adding and changing the ingredients. ~ Chris Geiger