Corita Kent Quotes

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

The artist in me welcomes another opportunity to be creative.

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

I want to create. I think that's the one word I can grow on.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

I believe in creative work.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

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.

Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

Everything an artist spits is art.

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

Being an artist is celebrating life.

In a way, artists are shamans, facilitators who take what's there, channel it through themselves, then put it out there for people to appreciate.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

Artists need to express.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Making art is different for everyone.