Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical.

I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Art is a continuum.

I made one untitled piece.

Entertainment is in art like color in pictures.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

To put what you see on paper is the same as funneling what you feel through yourself as a performer.

I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.