Julia Cameron Quotes

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

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.

It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.

When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

You can't rush inspiration.

As opposed to putting too much confidence in myself, or in an image or a scene or a set of brushes, I really want to allow the oil paint to perform, to show me the things that it wants to do, beyond my imagination.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.

Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

There are these painterly things that happen while I'm working.