Amy Lowell Quotes

Art is difficult.

To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It's always a bit excruciating because there's always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

I don't think there's any single finished point for a work. It's done when something's happening with the work that feels like a balanced, coherent disharmony. That's one way to say it. And where if I keep working on it, to discover and struggle with new problems, I'll obliterate the ones I was working on. I could keep working on it, but it'd become something different. And I value what's here, at the moment.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

There's nothing wrong with provocative art work: I even look forward to the day when I can take pictures which will disturb even me.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

I think there's tons of life and excitement in Paris. There are lots of old people and young people creating sexy new culture, but they're having to do it in the middle of a theme park. Paris is so dedicated to preserving its sense of itself, "we were great once upon a time," that it's hard for people who are making work right now to have to struggle in this sort of museum.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

Art is really a battle.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

Well, the beginning is actually quite easy, because I can still be quite free about the way I handle things - colours, shapes. And so a picture emerges that may look quite good for a while, so airy and colourful and new. But that will only last for a day at most, at which point it starts to look cheap and fake. And then the real work begins - changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until it's done.