Edgar Degas Quotes

I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

As a child, I copied Duerer drawings and Bruegel.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

In my own life, I share my home with works by artists like Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Jackie Windsor and so many others, whose creativity is clear and fresh and compelling; the works break through the usual, and they inspire creativity; they inspire responses and understanding.

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.

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

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.

A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature... but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.

This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.