Artist Quotes
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To anyone who's trying to be an artist, in any medium, it's a very odd and lonely and nerve-wracking and scary process when you let anybody see what you're working on. You have to learn to listen to your instincts. Absorb other people's advice, opinions, or whatever it may be from the outside world, but at the end of the day, you have to be true to whatever it is that you're trying to say in that work.
Brian Henson
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One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it.
Stephen Fry
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The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
Bernard Berenson
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Learning how to shine a pair of shoes to me was like if you could do, you were like you were on your way to having abilities and skills as to be able to spit-shine a pair of shoes like they're patent leather. You're a bad dude. To spit-shine a pair of shoes. So, even to that small detail, that aided me and assisted me in becoming the artist that I am. My uncles' sense of style, their type of ties they used. The way they wore their suits, big and huge and baggy. The way they did their haircuts with the side burns. All of that.
Willie Herron
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And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.
Albert Camus
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As a fine artist I was drawn to composition and technique. I would count the cuts.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
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The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.
Michelangelo
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It is only after years of struggle and deprivation that the young artist should touch color - and then only in the company of his betters.
El Greco
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I think I've been lucky in the regard to have a team that sees me as an artist.
Regina King
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I equate inspiration with desire – the desire that moves us to be artists in the first place. To attempt to make a painting without this motivation is a waste of time.
Nita Engle
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Most of the time when I have met artists who have meant a lot to me, the experience has been well above expectation. People like Iggy, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Black Sabbath, Nick Cave, Hubert Selby Jr, Billy Gibbons, Al Pacino, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Johnny Cash etc. have been really great to me. What strikes me is most of the time, the bigger the celeb/legend, the more polite and cool they are. It's the insecure ones who treat you like they're doing you a favor by shaking your hand.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.
David Bowie
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Something in me was instinctively drawn to the life of a misunderstood, brilliant and wilful artist. I wanted to become one.
John Lloyd Young
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The beauty with comics - and also the risk - is it is a far smaller number of voices. It's the writer and the artist and to a lesser extent the editor, who typically is the silent partner, if you've got a good enough team. Whatever you put out is the author's intent. You have to be able to defend that, of course. You have no one to hide behind, or no one to blame but yourselves, which I find refreshing because I've found in film too many times I've been blamed for other people's decisions.
Eric Heisserer
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When you work with a major label they create their own message for you and a lot of the time that works great, or at least it did back in the 90's but now it doesn't work, so I think as an artist if you learn your own business, like anybody would when they want to start a little restaurant - they'd figure it out and then build it and they work hard - then it could be your own little business that you grew to as big as you want it to be but you had much more control with how to communicate it and how it's cared for.
Tom DeLonge
Blink-182
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In our time photojournalists were as important as the writers. Today not so. Photojournalism is diminishing. Now everyone is a free artist, which can only be in photography. For he is taking pictures! Releases the shutter and becomes an artist. Godsend people they are, otherwise the world was doomed. They are so significant. I fear bumping into one of these celebrities walking in the street, which would be very disrespectful indeed.
Ara Guler
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There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.
Wole Soyinka
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Nowhere does one come to know an artist better than in his prints and the woodcut is the most graphic of the print processes.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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In the interests of everyone the artist had a responsibility to use his medium well. In the Tibetan culture, most of the paintings are of deities or Buddhas, and they try to send a message of the value of the spiritual.
Dalai Lama
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No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.
Steven Erikson