John Ruskin Quotes

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Art would be useless if the world were perfect.

I find that the quest to be perfect and make perfect music is like a black whole. I realize that you can come with the intention to capture a vibe and use a formula, but you have to accept that most of the time its not going to be what you envisioned and you might manifest something better. I think that's been the hardest thing to wrap my head around that most ideas we go for ends up sounding different. I think art in general should be about enjoying the process and the experience. All that matters is if you feel the music and it captures the element your going for.

What I've learned from sketch is you can get it as perfect as you want, and it's never going to be perfect.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It's about making the best kind of image I can make, it's about talking as clearly as I can.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

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'.

I don't see art as entertainment.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.