George C. Wolfe Quotes

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

The time is a thing; you don't have so much time. A good trick is to try and think about a way to use material from one occupation for the other. It's like going through working a day job, this is so dumb to say, but you know how Julian Schnabel made those crockery paintings while he was working as a short-order cook? It's like that, using what is around, transforming that to create meaning and make art. Trying to take nothing and make... something.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

Whats a gonzotic frenzy? Well its me in the throes of an ink splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that particular time.

People're artists they're doing something, taking a hunk of chaps, giving it some order, some form, and presenting it saying here is my little song and dance, my chaos.

In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don't do it, you don't know what might happen.

A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will proudce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

Making art is an act of courage. Do you know who said that?

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

This might end up in crying. If you're not prepared to cry about it, I'm not sure you're making art. And if you're not prepared to dance in anticipation, you're definitely not making art.

How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

Art is craft, not inspiration.

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.

The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

The making of art is no different than prayer.