Morris Graves Quotes

Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

Art is the skin of the soul.

Individuals have to find a place to experience a profundity of feeling, and art is a means to that.

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

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

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

Spiritual teaching must always be by symbols.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

Art is a spiritual practice. We may not, and need not, do it perfectly.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!