Paul Rand Quotes

The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Without electricity, there can be no art.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

I am making art. It's not a job that you've gotta show up to and fill in your slot. This is a dream come true. You get the opportunity to say something, to make a piece of art and hang it on the wall forever. Sometimes you're gonna have to take your time.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

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

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Art and life go together. I have to have a life filled with experiences to make art, and I have to have art around me to live well.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.