Scott Cohen Quotes

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

It's a great challenge and a wonderful journey how to figure out how to be an artist and to carve my way.

Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.

It feels like I'm starting to come into my own in terms of where I want to go artistically, toward more complicated, interesting characters.

People would say to me, 'Who do you want to be as an artist?' And I would just look at them because I didn't know.

The artist is called a creator.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

Sometimes for a lot of new artists, they don't have a vision, really, or know what they want to say; it's kind of drawn out for them. But me, because I'm such a transcendental thinker, it's always like a journey and an adventure with each project. It's like going through a different doorway each time.

I think, as an artist, it's very important to continue to be challenged and feel challenged all the time.

In life we try to grow and better ourselves. As an artist, I feel like I've grown tremendously.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

I think for an artist it's really important to have experiences, and I've had a lot of those. It's definitely inspired my lyrics and my style, even down to what I wear.

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

I think with anything where you delve into the back story of an artist, it kind of explains their work more intimately.

In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

The feeling of an evolution is a constant for every artist who is pursuing the search of refinement and enlargement of his/her own means of expression.

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.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?