Joshua Reynolds Quotes

I don't see art as entertainment.

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Drawing is deception.

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

I have never really been a great artist. I have been a human being that has loved art, which is not the same thing. But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have.

Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

The foreground in a picture is always unattractive... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.

So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.