Artistic Task Quotes

You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

I think that to make something alive, instead of on a page, is an honorable task. And it turns me on.

It is a task of art to express clear vision of reality.

The job of the artist is to point at things.

My assistants generally do all the flowers and all of the decorative work. I concentrate on the figure.

To extract beauty from one's own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art.

An artists job is to see. And to go out in the world and see it firsthand, just as it is; to report with line and words what is seen. To be in the world, not just study about the world, that is the artists task

If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.

For me, as an actor, there is no commercial or independent or art cinema. For me, it's a character that is given by the director. And it is a task for me that I have to fulfill it to the best of my ability regardless of the kind of film that it is.

It sounds simple, of course, but personally I can think of no more mentally arduous task than making music.

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

I think that when you do any kind of theatrical form, (you can't really do this in the theater) the task as an artist is to reach some form of catharsis yourself, and express something that allows an audience to have some form of catharsis. If there's no discovery in what you do, if there's no struggle in what you do to have that discovery, then, there's no meaning in what you do.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

At restaurants, I carry paper and markers and tell everyone to draw a picture with a unicorn, an octopus and an explosion. That keeps kids still for a minute.

To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

That is the artistic task: To choose the best from these solutions.

The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations.

I think that directing is the ultimate martyred task of filmmaking, that it has nobility to it. It takes three years to make a film, for the most part. I think it requires the attentiveness of a mother hen.

The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)