Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

While it may be a really trying, weird time for the art world, I see good work all the time. If you just go around to that many galleries, and if you stay open, you're going to see work with enough energy and surprise. I don't think I've ever gone to the galleries without coming home thinking, Gee, I now know something I didn't know this morning.

You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed

Beauty inspires me - beauty in nature, people, and art. Smells and fragrances too. I know it sounds weird, but I'm a "fume head." I'm very olfactory-driven.

Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.

I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.

I'm so in awe of what visual artists do and I do understand the differences of what visual artists do. I have a small art collection I hope to expand.

I try to write art theory down and understand it but I'm not a writer. I don't want to impress people with my writing. I'd rather impress people with my ability to see and feel it and then share that.

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

In fact, every day I'll read a chapter of some art book. I don't know why. It's just a habit.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

Two of my favorite artists are Josh Smith and Joe Bradley. But I argued against them for years, until I grew to love them and felt stupid for my immediate reaction towards their work. Now, I wouldn't be happier than to simply be their friend and to talk to them about what got them making art that was years ahead of my understanding. I never went to school for art or was told what to like or when. So every day is a learning process, like most of life.

The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.

A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.