Artistic Symbolism Quotes

I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts. Color, form - all these are the work of Lucifer.

It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

First, a confession: I liked 'The Da Vinci Code.' This news is even more of a surprise to me than it might be to those who, years ago, heard me quip that I quit reading it because 'the moment the albino assassin came through the door, I left.'

Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

Michael [Jackson] had paintings of himself at Neverland depicting himself as a knight and surrounded by cherubs and angels. People might think he's an egomaniac, but he's not. It's because the world turned against him.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.

Actors are always looking for new territory, and playing an African figure would be really a great symbol for me because of my Senegalese roots. It would make my parents proud, so of course I'd do it.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

Tattoos don't impress me. For me it's just another awkward part of fame. It's extraordinary - tattoos in basketball and soccer, it's quite extraordinary.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

I don't understand art-speak. My pictures are big doodles. I'm amazed what people come up with when they look at them. There's one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

When mountains and waters are painted, blue, green, and red paints are used, strange rocks and wondrous stones are used, the four jewels and the seven treasures are used. Rice-cakes are painted in the same manner. When a person is painted, the four great elements and five skandhas are used.

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.