Eric Fischl Quotes

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.

In any of the arts, you never stop learning.

I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that... but that's what it did.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

By the time I was 12, I had decided to be an artist.

When it comes to art, you just need to be focused on doing a great thing. Not thinking all about the business.

Art is something in which you are never an expert at any point of time. It's something you hone all the time and something which is elusive all the time.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

Being an artist is celebrating life.

To be sure an artist wishes to raise his standard intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain in obscurity. Pleasure must be found in the studying.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

My friend advised me to go into studying art, which at first shocked me because art was so easy. It was just something I did, like breathing or brushing my teeth. It couldn't be a job. I had a much more difficult time writing plays, making myself sit at that typewriter and finish those things.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

I was a commercial artist when I left school, but luckily I became an actor. I've painted for many, many years. Now the last few years it's gotten more serious.

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is 'genius'), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

The Artist's Way is a spiritual journey, a pilrimage home to the self.

I'm a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that's my cross to bear