Visual Arts

Quotes & Thinkers in Visual Arts

70 thinkers

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🇬🇧David Bowie

Music

1947–2016

"I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir."

"If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future."

"The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway — it is called medication."

"Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century."

🇫🇷Charles-François Daubigny

Art

Barbizon school

1817–1878

"Adieu, adieu, I am going to see up there whether friend Corot has found me any new subjects for landscape painting."

"When I blow up a balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal."

"The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their art—"

"The Brothers Maris , ed. Charles Holme; text: D.C. Thomson; publishers: Offices of 'The Studio', London - Paris, 1907"

"To break and be able to grow together again in a better way: that is the difficult art."

"..the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation."

"In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?"

39 quotes

Marianne von Werefkin

Art

Expressionism

1860–1938

"Marianne Werefkin: Author's bio by Adrienne Kochman on 19thc-artworldwide.org"

"Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform. Ultimately a closed system just can't go that far."

"What, after all, is a pretty woman? It's a mere subjective impression – what you yourself think of her. That's what I paint, another kind of beauty of my own."

"Documentary: Unlikely Murals, Mostly ... Part1"

"Amrita Sher-Gill: Art and Life: A Reader"

"Elevate the soul by grandiose images beyond all everyday pettiness."

"I would feel unhappy in a country with which I disagree with law and morality."

16 quotes

🇺🇸Elaine de Kooning

Journalism

abstract expressionism

1918–1989

"women painted women: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, and so forth. And I thought, men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as sex objects."

"There’s no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist. It’s not like becoming a doctor or something. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist."

"You probably think that my future landscapes will be soaked in pessimism, so to speak? Don’t worry, I love nature too much."

"You cannot teach painting because everyone's colour sense is different. But drawing..you either get it right or wrong. You can tell whether people have drawn from life from their pictures."

"Personal Webpage on Viewing Japanese Prints. General background on Hokusai, Edo and Osaka Ukiyo-e, and other print artists."

"Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City"

"I knew what a circle could do. Both eyes focus on it. It stamps itself out, like a dot. This, in turn, causes one's vision to spread, as in a mandala in Tantric art."

"'Life? or Theater?' - A Play with Music - C.S."

19 quotes

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Art

Expressionism

1880–1938

"though strange to the ordinary man, was not meant to shock, it was a pure and simple compulsion to integrate art and life.."

60 quotes

🇺🇸James McNeill Whistler

Art

Aestheticism

1834–1903

"'I know of only two painters in the world,' said a newly introduced feminine enthusiast to Whistler, 'yourself and Velasquez.' 'Why,' answered Whistler in dulcet tones, 'why drag in Velasquez?'"

30 quotes

🇬🇧Henry Holiday

Art

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1839–1927

"Much fruitless speculation has been spent over supposed hidden meanings in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark. The inclination to search for these was strictly natural, though the search was destined to fail."

"Painting can never show her nose in company with architecture without being snubbed."

"I never thought I was shocking,” she says. “I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, ‘This is something they need. My culture is going to recognize it’s missing something.'"

6 quotes