Nina Arianda Quotes

I think that artists don't make art - the art makes itself through us. I'm not the doer. I'm just along for the ride. Acting really reminds me of that because I don't write the words; I don't make the decisions. That's the director. Narcissism is a tragic condition. It must be so miserable to live trapped in a reflection that only includes the smallest version of our identities. Our true identities should have no bounds and no limits.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Now painting is different. It's something recollected in tranquility.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

Once I make a picture, I never look at it again.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

My whole life, I've always had to be surrounded by creative things. I find it relaxing to be in touch with creations by other people.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

I need art around me always.