Visual Artist Quotes

Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests on his poetic and dramatic output. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Source: Wikipedia ~ Victor Hugo

The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary. ~ Aberjhani

Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician - but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment's hesitation. ~ Oliver Sacks

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

I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening. ~ Erykah Badu

When the topic of self-care came up, Eve, an academic, writer and visual artist said "There is no glory in a grind that literally grinds you down to dust". ~ Elaine Welteroth

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 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

As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across. ~ Del LaGrace Volcano

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

To me, as a visual artist, I don't want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera. ~ Andy Serkis

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

At the age of 80, I'm becoming a visual artist. This could be my rebirth. ~ Harry Seidler

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

Doing representations of real people is not my strongpoint as a visual artist, and I know that. ~ Nate Powell

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

We designers, we don't work in a vacuum. We need business people. We are not the fine artists we are often confused with. ~ Dieter Rams

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them. ~ Mark Rothko

I'm photographing all the time. I'm such a visual person and I don't want to miss that moment. ~ Danny Clinch

We visual communicators have so much good to share: rather than sharing our chemical and style addictions, we could be using our professional skills to help communicate health information, conflict resolution, democracy, technology. ~ David Berman

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist. ~ Jack Finney

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. ~ Hokusai Katsushika

In a world full of audio visual marvels, may words matter to you and be full of magic. ~ Peter Godfrey-Smith

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.
"oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists."
"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids. ~ Patti Smith

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same. ~ Jock Sturges

Every artist learns through imitation, but I rather doubt the aim of these things is artistic development. I assume they're either homages or satiric riffs, and are not intended to be taken too seriously as works in their own right. Otherwise I should be talking to a copyright lawyer. ~ Bill Watterson

You don't have to be an artist to be a creator, because creativity comes in a lot of forms, like cooking or keeping a house or dressing well. What you need is imagination, to make things up for yourself. ~ Iris Apfel

I have always been a martial artist by choice, an actor by profession, but above all, am actualising myself to be an artist of life. ~ Bruce Lee

Other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence. ~ Charlotte Saunders Cushman

An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music. ~ Moby

Tattoo is the magic word. It hits people in a way that no other visual medium does. And it is not simply visual, but visceral. Everybody has an opinion about it and everybody has a gut reaction. And because they are permanent, tattoos raise all these issues about life and death. ~ Don Ed Hardy

Other [artists'] music is really what you get most inspiration from, whether consciously or subconsciously. I like a lot of old music and a lot of soul music. I also really like a lot of new stuff. ~ Ben Rector

You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man do death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. ~ Bertrand Russell

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic 'right-brain' thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. ~ Daniel H. Pink

God, the supreme artist, uses our life for the creation of art. We are the instruments through which the force of life expresses itself. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

The artist should not be satisfied to only play the part of a mirror. ~ Jules Breton

You can't reject anything in your life as an artist. Everything has its use. ~ Richard C. Armitage

My mentality is that when I go to sleep at night, I'm a better martial artist than when I woke up in the morning. ~ Georges St-Pierre

The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home. ~ Mark Denman

Every man in creating the beautiful appearance of the dream worlds is a perfect artist. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A pickup artist must be the exception to the rule. You must not do what everyone else does. Ever. ~ Neil Strauss

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story. ~ Iris Murdoch

The director's task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Frightening for many artists is promoting themselves. They feel it is ... artificial and not what we want to be known for. Yet if we start thinking about what we do as important and important to offer to people, not to sell ... it allows us to shift the way we think about promoting ourselves. ~ Adam Leipzig

'Mars et Avril' is a science fiction film. It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen. ~ Martin Villeneuve

I am a hip-hop artist, as you probably know. My hip-hop name is Big Smalls. ~ Jo Brand

The artist is the world's scapegoat. ~ Jacob Epstein

At least I had that, one guy understood me. ~ Yoko Ono

The music alone wasn't enough. It was great, but when an artist had an amazing look - like the MC5, or the Stooges, or Alice Cooper - you really got sucked in. The wardrobe was so important. At a show, you were engrossed in the music, but you were also engrossed in everything from the haircuts to what they were wearing. ~ John Varvatos

First of all, computer animation is certainly a tremendous and viable medium today. But the warmth and personality derived from 2-D animation, in my opinion, cannot be surpassed. Certain stories lend themselves well to 3-D animation and I won't labor this with naming them, but in my bones, I still respond more emotionally to the artists feel in 2-D. You feel the 'actor' in the animator more personally ... it's hard to explain. ~ Richard Sherman

See . . . um . . . the thing is, I met with Lisa a few days ago. She wanted to apologize for . . . Halloween, and not calling . . .

Thing is, her previous story . . . um . . . She wanted me to read it. She . . . wanted to explain her issues. She was jealous . . . of you and me becoming friends and . . . kinda lost it, I guess.

My point is, um . . . she used the story to put it into words . . .

I think she is writing messages. . . to you. ~ Stjepan Sejic

Whenever the occasional doubt starts to creep into my mind about my artistic ability, I start to think about the reality of having the greatest artist ever living inside of me. The One who created the orchid, peacock and the human circulatory system is the same God who gives me ideas for my next logo project. The God who parted the Red Sea is the same God who knows Photoshop. The God who raised Lazurus from the dead is the same God who brings new clients to me. He can do anything! If we want to talk about a fear of failing, we have to talk about being blessed to know the One who can do anything but fail. ~ V.L. Thompson

This impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist. If ~ Amanda Palmer

The highest thing people can say about an artist is, 'You know, I felt he or she was singing right to me.' If you've got the goods, and you're honest, that's where the thrill comes in, because of the urgency of the people really feeling what they feel. It's right there. ~ Steve Ross