James Whistler Quotes

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

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

The artist is called a creator.

Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

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.

A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.

To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world.

Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.

not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.