"The best you can do is make art you care about--and lots of it!"
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)
"Be always looking for the thing you like and not afraid of overstating it."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"The object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it."
--Stephen Nachmanovitch (
Free Play)
"It will not do to have your fine thought yesterday, and paint your picture today."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"There's no such thing as good art or bad art. There's only art--and damn little of it!"
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)--quoting James Thurber
"In the middle of a crosswalk, or the middle of the night, an inspiration is equally easy to forget."
--Don Haggerty
"The ego is always thirsty and hungry. It should be left outside the studio door."
--Audrey Flack (
Art and Soul)
"While you may feel you're just pretending that you're an artist, there's no way to pretend you're making art."
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)
"But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a 'creative person,' but only of a creative act."
--Rollo May (
The Courage to Create)
"Men of the world think that pictures are made simply by moving the brush; they do not understand that painting is no easy matter."
--From Osvald Siren (
The Chinese on the Art of Painting)
"As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn't. It makes us frustrated people."
--Julia Cameron (
The Artist's Way)
"The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it."
--Stephen Nachmanovitch (
Free Play)
"It has never bothered me a bit when people say that what I'm doing is not art. I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to,
because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself. And it's always the moment of doing it that counts."
--Calvin Tomkins (
The Bride and the Bachelors)--quoting artist Robert Rauschenberg
"I don't want to reform the world, I just want to live in it!"
--Calvin Tomkins (
The Bride and the Bachelors)--quoting artist Robert Rauschenberg
"A painting doesn't have to look like another person's work to have been influenced by it."
--Katharine Kuh (
The Artist's Voice)--quoting painter Franz Kline
"At some level, all art is autobiographical."
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)
"I don't go to the studio to create a painting. Rather, I go to the studio to paint. The difference is subtle, but not really."
--Don Haggerty
"Color first and house after, not house first and color after."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"You will discover the joy of practicing your creativity. The process, not the product, will become your focus."
--Julia Cameron (
The Artist's Way)
"Klee described his drawing as 'taking a line for a walk.'"
--Michael Batterberry (
Twentieth Century Art)--writing of artist, Paul Klee
"Smuggle some red in.'"
--Bill Cumming, painter
"If you look into the past of a successful painter, you will find square miles of canvas."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"The difference between a student and a professional is that a professional knows how to give themselves their own assignments."
--From an art instructor of Don Haggerty's long ago
"The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration."
--Steven Pressfield (
The War of Art)
"I want you to see things from the realization that your drawing does not need to be a house. The view that you must take is that this is a piece of God's outdoors, that this is shadow and this is light. You ought to tremble before it, and not sit down like a magician and try to make windows."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"Swing a bigger brush; you don't know what fun you are missing."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"Train your eyes to be passive observers of the activity of your hands.
Allow the body to monitor the rightness of the stroke and the poignancy of the emergent image. You will know when some novel
image or gesture is 'right,' because your body will register a sense of well-being, naturalness, quiet strength."
--Peter London (
No More Secondhand Art)
"Think of your work as the portrait of a day rather than the portrait of a model."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play."
--Julia Cameron (
The Artist's Way)
"It seems to me that I make shallow and uninteresting things whenever I challenge myself to do shallow and uninteresting tasks."
--Peter London (
No More Secondhand Art)
"Don't look up at nature and consider an inch at a time. See what one big spot is in relation to the other big spots."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"Your style is the way you talk in paint."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"I paint sparse branches and dried leaves and give them life--some high some low, as if endowed with feeling. One only has to drink to bamboos for ten years, and as he paints, poetry will flow from his brush."
--L.C. Lai (
Chinese Painting: Its Mystic Essence)--from an inscription on a painting by Chinese painter, Shih T'ao
"I used to work in a studio making large sculptures, which I then installed outside illegally. Often, when I was placing them outside, people
asked what I was doing, and if I replied, "Art," then most said, "Ah OK," and I could see they would stop thinking about the work. It seems to me that people who
are not familiar with the art world would assume that they wouldn't be able to understand it. So I instead started answering people by saying: "This is something
that I have to do." With this answer, I could see that people were beginning to think to themselves: "Why does he have to do this?" To them, it must be strange
to see someone working outdoors in the city who is clearly not being paid."
--Brad Downey (
Spontaneous Sculptures)--in response to Brad being asked in an interview, "Do you consider yourself an artist?"
"And don't forget, there's a lot of damn labor in making a sculpture."
--Katharine Kuh (
The Artist's Voice)--quoting sculptor David Smith
"Judging a Manet from the point of view of Bouguereau, the Manet has not been finished. Judging a Bouguereau from the point of view of Manet, the Bouguereau has not been begun."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"No work of art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"If one discusses painting with a view to its faculty to render distance, one must admit that it does not equal real landscape, but if one considers the wonders of brushwork, it becomes evident that real landscapes do not equal painting."
--from Osvald Siren (
The Chinese on the Art of Painting)
"The hardest thing about art making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over."
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)
"Never make things as a study to be thrown away. Never think you are going to be further along than you are--because you are as good as you
ever will be at the moment. That which you do is the thing."
--Katharine Kuh (
The Artist's Voice)--quoting sculptor Isamu Noguchi
"It is harder to see a landscape than to paint it. This is true because there are lots of clever people who can paint anything,
but lacking the seeing power, paint nothing worth while."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"If I could see and really understand the essence of the life that is right around me, I could with even such technique as I now command make masterpieces."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"Mistakes have a biology, they are not simply erased. The erasing of the mistake, words or paint, doesn't return the space to a blank."
--Audrey Flack (
Art and Soul)
"Until the painting is finished, it's all underpainting."
--Don Haggerty
"The truth is that a piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse."
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)--writing of the inherently precarious nature of art in the making
"Award-winning art? The category doesn't apply. You might find a great work of art in someone falling over in a supermarket. That might be the most extrordinary visual encounter of your day."
--Sarah Thornton (
Seven Days in the Art World)--from an interview with Turner Prize nominee, video artist Phil Collins
"Remember, it is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work."
--Julia Cameron (
The Artist's Way)
"Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. 'I write only when inspiration
strikes,' he replied. 'Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.'"
--Steven Pressfield (
The Art of War)
"What finally convinced me to go ahead [and begin writing] was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead. I was developing symptoms. As soon as I sat down and began, I was okay."
--Steven Pressfield (
The War or Art)
"Simply put, artists learn to proceed, or they don't."
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)
"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."
--Stephen Nachmanovitch (
Free Play)--quoting poet Wendel Berry
"Without surrender and trust--nothing."
--Stephan Nachmanovitch (
Free Play)
"If the art world begins to destroy your life, give it up. Don't give up art."
--Audrey Flack (
Art and Soul)
"The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies.
We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible."
--Lewis Hyde (
The Gift)
"You have to find something that is true to yourself as a person--some non-negotiable core that will get you through a forty-year artistic practice."
--Sarah Thornton (
Seven Days in the Art World)--from an interview with filmmaker, William E. Jones, about the value of crits to art students
"That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure."
--Steven Pressfield (
The Art of War)
"I learned from my heart, my heart learned from my eye, my eye learned from the Hua Mountain."
--from Osvald Siren (
The Chinese on the Art of Painting)--writing of Chinese poet and painter, Wang Li
"During the creative process, rather than orient ourselves as we do on a map, concerning ourselves with how close or far we are from 'home,'
we may consider orienting ourselves on an alternative scale, one of depth or degree. In this way questions such as 'How far away am I from home?' are replaced with
questions such as 'How deep am I? How far from the surface of things? How high am I? How far have I allowed my imagination to soar?'"
--Peter London (
No More Secondhand Art)
"When it happens once, witness inspiration. When it happens twice, call it experimentation. But three times or more--it's a formula."
--Don Haggerty
"It is not easy to know what you like. Most people fool themselves their entire lives through about this. Self-acquaintance is a rare condition."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"The correlate of 'art as beauty' is 'art as meaning.' The correlate of a prepared hand and eye is a prepared heart, mind, and spirit.
The correlate of the formulas of good design is the absence of any formula, where imagination serves as a better guide than memory, and where courage
fuels the journey from the known to the unknown."
--Peter London (
No More Secondhand Art)
"Always be looking for the unexpected in nature--you can have no formulas for anything; search constantly."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"The daily commerce of our lives--'sugar for sugar and salt for salt,' as the blues singers say--proceeds at its own constant level,
but a gift revives the soul. When we are moved by art, we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts."
--Lewis Hyde (
The Gift)
"Starting with a note of truth in a picture is the important thing--the first color you put down influences you right straight through."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"Make a lot of starts."
--Charles Hawthorne (
Hawthorne on Painting)
"The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin the work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze."
--Bayles and Orland (
Art and Fear)
"The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own. Often enigmas that baffle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand."
--Stephan Nachmanovitch (
Free Play)
"A great painter will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, 'How did I do it?'."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
"I am not interested in art as a means of making a living, but I am interested in art as a means of living a life."
--Robert Henri (
The Art Spirit)
Bibliography of Great Art Teachings
The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri, Westview Press, 1951
Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, Capra Press, 1993
Art and Soul: Notes on Creating, by Audrey Flack, Penquin Putnam, 1986
The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists, by Katharine Kuh,
Da Capo Press, 2000
The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, Putnam Books, 1992
The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, by Calvin Tomkins, Penguin Books, 1968
The Chinese on the Art of Painting, by Osvald Siren, Schocken Books, Inc., 1963
Chinese Painting: Its Mystic Essence, by T. C. Lai, Swindon Book Company, 1974
The Courage to Create, by Rollo May, W. W. Norton & Company, 1975
Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch, Penguin Putnam, 1990
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, by Lewis Hyde, Penguin Putnam, 1990
Hawthorne on Painting, Collected by Mrs. Charles W. Hawthorne, Dover Publications, 1960
No More Secondhand Art, by Peter London, Shambala, 1989
Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008
Spontaneous Sculptures, by Brad Downey, Gestalten, 2011
Twentieth Century Art, by Michael Batterberry, McGraw-Hill, 1973
The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, Warner Books, 2002
