Joan Miro Quotes

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.

I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out.

Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don't know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.

All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.

Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.