Henry Ossawa Tanner Quotes

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

Every work of art is the child of its time, often it is the mother of our emotions.

The sculptor who deals with form seeks to imprison beauty in a marble statue that will withstand the ravages of time during millenniums; but a marble statue is cold and speaks to but a few of the most evolved who are able to infuse the statue with their own life.

History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

When I perform Strauss, it is as if the music fits me like a glove. My voice seems to lie in a happy area in this music, which is lyrical and passionate at the same time.

Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

Maybe with your emotions and your feelings, someone else can say it in a different way than you would, which brings new life to the way you might sing it.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Not every work of art connects with the audience.

During 'Torches,' I was more concerned with communicating the spirit of the song than the actual lyrics.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

I think what happens with a lot of writing and art is that specificity ends up being relatable while universality becomes vague.

Listening to the stories told in jazz music and how those artists expressed their truths about the times and what they were dealing with is what struck me the most.

What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.