Vitruvius Quotes

In art, practice always comes before theory.

The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

The Arts are learnt by reason and method; they are mastered by practice.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

An artist who brings to his work a mind tolerably furnished with the general principles of art, and a taste formed upon the works of good artists – in short, who knows in what excellence consists - will, with the assistance of models... be an overmatch for the greatest painter that ever lived who should be debarred such advantages.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?

When I was in art school, the photo kids were separated from the rest. If you did sculpture or painting or graphic design, you were all taking the same classes, but the photographers just went straight into photography.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

Creativity is often blocked by trying to be perfect. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whether he is going. Practice must always be founded on sound theory, and to this Perspective is the guide and the gateway; and without this nothing can be done well in the matter of drawing.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

One of the things I've learned is there's no lesson to be learned. You have to resign yourself to the fact that mistakes are going to be made at any time in the creative process.

And the part about being a professional artist is that you can tell, and you can do it over again, even if you can't say how you got there exactly.

The costume designer designing clothes that helped the comedy in The Proposal, that sold the character. Each and every detail was so perfectly thought of, what wouldn't be here? That's a lost art.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.