Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

If you're a painter, you're not alone. There's no way to be alone.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

If you create something that is essentially alien to you - as a man - and make a film about woman, the more I can surround myself with woman and combine it with my soul's point of view, the more I become a stranger in a strange land.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

Art should be on the side of humanity.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

I do not paint nature. I am nature.

It's funny, I don't even consider myself a rapper, I don't consider myself a designer, or even an actor. I just like creating stuff and trying to make good work, whatever it is. I don't care if it's designing toothbrushes. It's just making cool stuff to leave behind, that's all it is, it's nothing more.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.