Chris Van Allsburg Quotes

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

Where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent.

My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing. Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.

No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is 'genius'), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

If you need drugs to be a good writer, you are not a good writer.

If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.

I tried painting for a short time and realized that I was not a child prodigy at painting.

The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.

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

I really want to continue doing art. I would love to go back to doing paintings one day.

I can draw and paint in many different styles, and use different mediums to create work.

Drawing and visual arts was kinda my first passion going all the way back to when I was a kid. I always felt like it was what I was supposed to do - but in reality I don't know that I ever had the skill to make it a profession.

There's a new Mozart, a new Miles Davis, a new Misty Copeland, a new Matisse potentially languishing in a math class somewhere. If we fail to introduce them to art, we fail humanity.

I started making art during high school but thought I lacked the talent to become a true artist.

I was a child prodigy. Like Michelangelo, who could draw a perfect circle at age five. I was extremely gifted. I could paint a perfect portrait of someone at age five.

The best of any artist is in their art.

I have such deep appreciation for artists who have the ability to create something from within, something completely unique and original to each piece of work.

Different people have different ways of doing things. For me, becoming a songwriter first and falling in love with the Nashville songwriting community and the process of songs and getting better and putting more in what I wanted to say, was absolutely vital in me even wanting to be an artist.

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

Art is about the spontaneous connection of the artist to his own unconscious - about insight beyond reason. If his insight were reasonable, anyone could do it, but anyone cannot. Only few can, and they are called.

A good poet's made as well as born.