Roger Scruton Quotes

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

Whoever wants to know something about me - as an artist which alone is significant - they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

I will say that a lot of art, some of the best art, has very powerful and meaningful messages behind it, and the more you read the stuff on the walls, the more you learn the artist's intention, and you have a totally new point of view of what it's about.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

art, n. This word has no definition.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

People assume that a self-portrait is narcissistic and you're trying to reveal something about yourself: fantasies or autobiographical information. In fact, none of my work is about me or my private life.

In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.

What does art mean to me? I never really think about the 'meaning' of art. Yet, obviously, that's what I do.

My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?