Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

Art is the skin of the soul.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man's soul.

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

The painting has a life of its own

I am an artist. For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul. And you are like in some kind of possession, where you are doing anything to get the visual. You become another person. You're becoming an artist in action. And then a lot of miracles come. A lot of discovering. It's a very complicated thing.

I never wanted to grow a thicker skin; I felt a real sense of pride in my thin skin, and in a weird way, I still do, because it's my thin skin that allows me to empathize with other people. It's the thing that allows me to create vulnerable art. It's the thing that allows me to create other feelings and make songs that actually grab people and touch people. I feel like I've spent my life fighting that thicker skin because I don't want to become an embittered asshole.

Art is the expression of the artist´s overflowing soul.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canva... Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

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.

For me, creativity is essentially a spiritual experience, a conversation between my soul and me.

Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.

I approach my music-making as an art-form--something pure from the spirit to which I can add dynamics and marketable reality. Music is genuine and healthy and the stimulation I get from molding it and adding dynamics is like nothing else on earth.

Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

Personally, I never believe an artist saying "I do it for myself" is saying the truth, because why would you go through the trouble of making something that goes out into the world if you didn't care about somebody else seeing it? It's like the difference between those who choose "more comfortably termed entertainment" versus what people think of as the "art life," which is supposedly more monastic or spiritual. I don't believe in those distinctions.

To become romantic artists, we must pierce the armor that hides our hearts, and the piercing is not comfortable.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.