Christo Quotes

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Everything that an artist does is a risk. Some people want you to stay the same. If you want to evolve, they want to keep you in a certain place.

I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.

Art is something that grows and breathes and lives, and it shouldn't be predicated on the success of box office - but it is. But within that, you have to give people a chance to find their voice, to play, to continue to create.

Art should be able to be innovative without compromising itself. That's why I believe artists should have bigger preoccupations than checking the price tags on their work or becoming curators' darlings.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

Being a creative person. It's so much more rewarding when you find things on your own, to live whatever the writers are writing or to display what the director is looking for. You are the thing that everybody uses to get the story out.

If I'm collaborating with an artist I like to give them my point of view and if they don't want to take any of my recommendations it's fine, but it's hard otherwise.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

I like making movies. I like the process. I like trying out new ideas, and if they don't work, they don't work. That's the reason I generated the money in the first place, to be able to try things. That's where I spend my money.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Being in the studio, it's more of a controlled environment, where you can be Salvador Dali and sit back and look at the painting. And you can go, 'Ah, you know what? Maybe a little bit more red over here...maybe add some blue over here.' You can sit back and look at the painting.

I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

It's the nature of the beast within us to keep going back to the familiar rather than to strap on faith and face the future.

It's such an intimate experience, being a director, artistically. It's deep and it's satisfying and it's wonderful, on so many levels, but it's also really scary.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Conventional wisdom can get us into so much trouble, especially as artists.

I really love the experience of moving things around, in terms of being a director.

This beginning with Audacity, or being thrown into the middle of it, is already a very great part of the art of painting.