Julia Cameron Quotes

I'm not the kind of artist who has an idea and then carries it out; it's more like I find what the idea was through doing the paintings.

We truly experienced a lot as artists.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is 'genius'), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

I love develop as an artist, to push my envelope, to grow, to make mistakes, to learn from them and to try and be the very best that I can be while I'm on this earth.

Sometimes for a lot of new artists, they don't have a vision, really, or know what they want to say; it's kind of drawn out for them. But me, because I'm such a transcendental thinker, it's always like a journey and an adventure with each project. It's like going through a different doorway each time.

In life we try to grow and better ourselves. As an artist, I feel like I've grown tremendously.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.

The artist in me cries out for design.

When I was a young artist, and I would go look at other artists' career retrospectives, and I was often disappointed with the lack of story line... What was missing to me was the story of where the artist came from and how they got to where they were.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

I think, like any artist, those baby songs are not the best things you've ever written, but they count because they're you're first attempts at creating art and expressing yourself.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.