Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.

How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

The artist is called a creator.

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

Everything an artist spits is art.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.