Etel Adnan Quotes

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.

The work that I feel is most authentically mine is the one that is my first reaction, the first thing that feels like the truth. In aggregate, those choices, those series of decisions, create your point of view, your visual language.

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

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

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

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, 'This is my vision.'

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

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.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

I know that some people work differently, but I have to work from the inside out. It doesn't matter how big the character is, there has to be a truthful core.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

A design that I create is like my own extension. It's 'thinking made visible.'

Life and art are inseparable.

I just follow what inspires me as an artist and a storyteller, and stay true to myself in my work.

My approach is simple. It is nothing other than what I am thinking at the time I make each piece of clothing, whether I think it is strong and beautiful. The result is something that other people decide.