Alexander Calder Quotes

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

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.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.

As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

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.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

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.

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

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

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.