Cass McCombs Quotes

Our appreciation of folk art will strengthen our identities, our pride in belonging to a community. People trained in the creative use of their hands soon acquire skills, excellent craftsmanship which will be the most important measure of how well we can industrialize.

I'm a folk artist at heart.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.

African art is functional, it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing, a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.

The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.

There is art in everything - industry, education, play, all are forms of art.

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

Fashion does not have to prove that it is serious. It is the proof that intelligent frivolity can be something creative and positive

All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims - the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves.

Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

Creation is everything you do. Make something.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

Mold clay into a bowl. The empty space makes it useful.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

Crafting is putting ideas into action and then holding them together with an inexpensive adhesive.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

The arts have long been an integral and vibrant part of our nation's cultural heritage. In its many forms, art enables us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our society. Providing us with a unique way to learn about people of other cultures, it allows us to discover all that we have in common. At its best, art can beautify our cities, encourage economic development and social change, and profoundly affect the ways we live our lives.

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something.