Joshua Reynolds Quotes

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

I guess artists are living inspiration. There's something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It's not unified.

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

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

When a designer creates, he looks at the world around him.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

I'm doing what all modern artists do now, which is nothing - just sit around and dream about things. I'll do what they call 'the stroke of genius.'

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.

A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

No one can ever create art, even on a piece of paper, as they have envisioned it in their mind.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.