Stephen Dobyns Quotes

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence.

I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.

The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.

That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

We thought philosophy ought to be patient and unravel people's mental blocks. Trouble with doing that is, once you've unravelled them, their heads fall off.

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.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.

If I've grown as an artist, it will be represented in the art. There's no need to explain it.