Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way things I had no words for.

Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening.

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

And, as true as fairy stories, he is painting somewhere yet!

Flowers and fields and wondrous woodlands, skies at sunrise and sunset

Painted in the sultry noontide, painted all the summer through:

Once an airy fairy painter painted in the dawn and dew,

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he for some reason thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme

Let me ask you something, what is not art?

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

There is something ghostly in all great art.

What art offers is space a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, You mean they forget? ~Howard Ikemoto

Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. ~Fran Lebowitz

Art holds fast when all else is lost. ~German Proverb

But that's what being an artist is feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker

Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. ~Wynetka Ann Reynolds

Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. ~Henry Moore

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

All art requires courage.

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts such is the duty of the artist.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. Painting is silent poetry.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Perfection in art, as often in life, is better captured by eraser than pencil.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines

Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature's varied forms.

I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such beings as crawl on earth.

All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.

My spirit was lifted and my soul nourished by my time in the garden. It gave me a calm connection with all of life, and an awareness that remains with me now, long after leaving the garden.

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.

To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes...

The garden is where you take the time in your life to tune in and listen. It just takes being still long enough, opening your heart, opening your spirit up to what the plants have to tell you.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth

Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.