Mary Cassatt Quotes

The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

There's no easy way to be free.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

I don't think there's any single finished point for a work. It's done when something's happening with the work that feels like a balanced, coherent disharmony. That's one way to say it. And where if I keep working on it, to discover and struggle with new problems, I'll obliterate the ones I was working on. I could keep working on it, but it'd become something different. And I value what's here, at the moment.

So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

The only thing that's changed for me is that I've figured out a new way to do this; when I go to record, I like to do the drums last, if that makes any sense to you.

I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

The easy way out is often just that-the 'easy' way out of the most rewarding lifestyle.

With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use - I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct.

I knew then and I know now, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it.

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

Success travels in the company of very hard work. There is no trick, no easy way.

If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding.

My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.

It seems like the more I punish myself, the better it's been. What it is, I'm relentless and I never give up. I never take the easy way out.

There's no easy quick way out, we're gonna have to live through our whole lives, win, lose, or draw.

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?

How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!

If we go for the easy way, then we never change.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

The romantic artist expects people to ask, 'What has he got to say?' The classical artist expects them to ask, 'How does he say it?

There are those who make music and movies in a linear way: They plan them, they have a script. Of course, you have to have a script sometimes, but that alone isn't enough.