Thomas Hood Quotes

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.

I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

The artist is called a creator.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

Try drawing or painting a scene you're working on. Often this will help free up you imagination.

The act of creation can be an extreme violent experience.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.

For every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work.