Poul Henningsen Quotes

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

There's nothing more special than intellect and labour that makes painting work. There's no magic there; it's information, and it's work.

They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Art without technique is invertebrate, shapeless, characterless.

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.

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 painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.

I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.

I think that an artist should be a skilled craftsman.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

The definition of an artist, for me, is someone who is quite selfish about their creativity.

I know how to paint... In a way there is a boredom there because a lot of the magic is gone.

Most people think that I'm so technical that I don't have a feel aspect or a rhythm aspect of it, but that's just the opposite. I need to get into my momentum and my rhythm in regards to being technical and analytical, and also being that artist.

The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. If you're a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. As an actor you develop how angry you should be. You select how angry you should be. You listen to the other actor and then you react. In film, sometimes the other actor isn't even there. You have to play the scene. What I do is I call on my experience on the stage. I play the scene and I hope that I reach a certain level of integrity because that's what I learned on the stage.

I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.

I've always sort of marveled at our ability to chat and match, because of, I come, honestly I think of myself of as a little bit of hack, and think like that, and I think of her [Mia Michaels] as an artist.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

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?

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.