John Ruskin Quotes

The idea of the museum is to show my work since the start, and I wanted to show all of it, not just to choose between different pieces. They are grouped together in themes - minimalism, androgyny, black and white, graphic, flowers, and so on - from the earliest designs to the most recent ones.

Well, I'm an artist to the core. And my objective has always been to use my talents and my skills to elevate humanity through my art.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.

It is the death of present art when it returns again and again to the model. Use of the model is only an intermediate stage in artistic development. Create out of a living spirituality to overcome everything naturalistic.

[My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.

Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty.

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

Obviously I've always loved singing and performing, but I fell in love with songwriting and then I enjoyed doing that for other people and getting coached. But then I kind of stumbled into the right group of people that really started to create some unique music for me and what I wanted to say, so then it made me want to be an artist.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

I think the best thing I learned from drawing comics is that it's a great exercise in concision.

Only art means anything.

I try to create paintings that are a window for the imagination. If people look at my work and are reminded of the way things once were, or perhaps, the way they could be, then I've done my job.

A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

When I’m behind a camera I forget I exist.

If I've grown as an artist, it will be represented in the art. There's no need to explain it.

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it's as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

There was a f**king review in f**king Melody Maker [of the first BOSSANOVA single, 'Velouria'] - 'Sounds like someone's been taking singing lessons'. Like, motherf**king A! I am the singer. Who do sing SONGS. It's like I never sang before; like I was - I don't know - reading PROSE on my previous records and now I sing. EXCUUUUUUSE me for singing

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me.

I don't use iMovie and don't use shitty little cameras to try to prove something or say something because that's a part of the process. We do it just because that's what we like to use.

The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

To talk about photos rather than making them seems idiotic to me. It's as though I went on and on about a woman I adored instead of making love to her.