Marilyn French Quotes

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

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

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

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

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.

The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

I think all art - if it's good - is a result of really trying to create something that you can't put into words. Where language ends is where good art begins.

I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.

Painting, especially much better than words, allows oneself to express the various stages of thought, including the deeper levels, the underground stages of the mental process.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

I sometimes wish I had never had to sell a painting. Every painting you make represents the time it was made and how you were feeling and what your influences were... You are never going to feel that way again, so you can never repeat it.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.

Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

I don't work off lights and angles; I work off emotions. A mood that I create.