Oskar Kokoschka Quotes

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

Art is truth.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

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

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

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 is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

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

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Art is the highest form of hope.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.