Patti Smith Quotes

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

... 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.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.

How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.

I think that at its best, painting can be an act of juggling perceptions, a hall of mirrors. And it can be a bit confusing and scattering. But as the artist, as the man behind the velvet rope who controls the smoke and the mirrors and the way that things move in the painted space, what I want to do is to try my best to be a good witness.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

The artist does not have to suffer to show suffering.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

A great artist has to be ready to fail.

I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.

I am not by nature the kind of creator who is transgressive in order to be transgressive.

As a street artist, I'm used to sharing my stuff with the public. It's a communal experience. I've learned not to be so precious, but rather to enjoy the process.

I don't want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, with bodily things...One wants to open the story, not close it.

I have the barn, it's just kind of like a studio. Almost all artists have la studio to work in, and that's really what it is. A place to get away. I'll spend maybe four days out there if I can, just completely immersed - like where I don't bathe or brush my teeth for a few days, just get up and make coffee and experiment until the sun goes down.