Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.
With the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive.
Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Color and I are one. I am a painter.
The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.
Art is freedom. If we don't have that element, we don't feel human anymore. Art is not decoration or a function. Before all that, art is art. This connection to meaning - our inner, intuitive knowledge - is something.
This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.
I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.
In every work of art, the artist himself is present.
What makes a tight circle or a tight little square box more of an intellectual statement than something done emotionally, I don't know. Art is an essence, a center.
Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.
My goal from the very beginning was just to write good songs that don't require any production to be felt or understood. I wanted to be able to sit in a room with a guitar and play the song from beginning to end and have it be as impactful as if you heard the studio version with all the bells and whistles.
It's always about the music, never about anything else.
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.
In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.
All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.
There comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft.
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.
