Robertson Davies Quotes

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you're communicating with people, and you're not in a void. On the other hand, because you're always creating and transforming, art always separates you - always.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun

Art is in the process of redefining our relationships to each other ... The creative minds are bubbling, bubbling, and I know the soup that's coming up next time is going to feed a lot more of us.

Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandeln sich. (The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.)

Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

At it's essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation.

Art is a wound turned into light.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

I have found that long durational art is really the key to changing consciousness. On such a deep level. Not just the performer, but the one looking at it.

Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty.

When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.

The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.

Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,--on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.

All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.

Art is too long, and life is too short.