The Big List of Art Quotes is the big daddy list with one art quotation from each artist listed on the artquotes.net website. I was going to call it the top 100 art quotes of all time but that wasn’t quite what I was after and I don’t want to limit myself to a number. So the goal is to pick one interesting art quote from each artist and let it grow as large as possible.
I’ll do another big list of famous quotes when I start adding more photographers, music artists, architects, poets, and so on. I think they’ll make a good starting point for people to explore, wander, and discover new artists and ideas. What do you think?
The Best Famous Art Quotes List
- Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.
Jean Arp Quotes - I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life.
Frank Auerbach Quotes - All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
Francis Bacon Quotes - I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.
Banksy Quotes - I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived.. and the picture that fights for its own life.
Georg Baselitz Quotes - I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
Jean-Michel Basquiat Quotes - My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn’t live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.
Max Beckmann Quotes - A dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.
Arnold Böcklin Quotes - The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.
Pierre Bonnard Quotes - Why reproduce what is ugly in nature? I do not see why it should be necessary.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau Quotes - When I go out to paint a landscape I’m less concerned with what it’s about but more concerned with how it looks.
Arthur Boyd Quotes - I’m always dubious about the remarks painters make about their own work, because what we so often say is rather what we would like to have done than what we’ve really done.
John Brack Quotes - Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.
Constantin Brancusi Quotes - Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.
Georges Braque Quotes - I believe in working hard. Painting is serious. A vice, not a play thing.
Bernard Buffet Quotes - The aesthetic value of these objects cannot be arrived at by reasoning. Familiarization is necessary.
Alexander Calder Quotes - It is as well not to have too great an admiration for your master’s work. You will be in less danger of imitating him.
Mary Cassatt Quotes - Deal with nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all placed in perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.
Paul Cezanne Quotes - Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not work is salvation.
Chuck Close Quotes - That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids.
John Constable Quotes - The stronger the individuality of an artist, the more he is exposed by the public to misunderstandings.
Lovis Corinth Quotes - I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.’
Gustave Courbet Quotes - I hope to capture a sense of the place I’ve been in; I do hope to do that. But of course when I get going the painting has it’s own life and it starts demanding certain things itself.
Elisabeth Cummings Quotes - At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
Salvador Dali Quotes - In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.
Jacques-Louis David Quotes - A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
Edgar Degas Quotes - A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Elaine de Kooning Quotes - The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
Willem de Kooning Quotes - Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Eugene Delacroix Quotes - There is often more psychic appeal in a so-called ugly woman than there is in a pretty one; and, in my ideal, I reconstruct her to bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume.
Andre Derain Quotes - I’ve never had an easy relationship with critics. I hold a lot of homicide in my heart. If this was another time, I’d be packing a piece.
Jim Dine Quotes - If I can’t be famous, I want at least to be infamous.
Otto Dix Quotes - My best work was always done and still is I think when I’m experimenting. If I stop experimenting I feel it just becomes a drudgery. That’s why I take so long and my sitters get tired waiting for commissioned portraits.
William Dobell Quotes - I think that painting has to have resonance. It has to have a life beyond what it’s depicting. Without that, it may be just a drawing, or illustration.
Peter Doig Quotes - I opened my own gallery, in 1980, which I always thought was the most honest thing you could do. It’s like a chef opening his restaurant.
Ken Done Quotes - It is an environment which I love and which I like to go back to, and for me it has a tremendous appeal, it is continually exciting, these curious and strange rhythms which one discovers in a vast landscape, the juxtaposition of figures, of objects, all these things are exciting.
Russell Drysdale Quotes - Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.
Jean Dubuffet Quotes - Millions of artist create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
Marcel Duchamp Quotes - A teacher can do very little for a pupil and should only be thankful if he don’t hinder him, and the greater the master, mostly the less he can say.
Thomas Eakins Quotes - What’s really good about the word ‘art’ is that ‘art’ is a word like ‘love,’ or ‘god,’ or whatever. It transcends so many things.
Tracey Emin Quotes - An artist does not usually exist independently of his society nor should they. Holding one’s breath is not an effective protest against air pollution.
Ron English Quotes - A painter may know what he doesn’t want. But woe be to him if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself.
Max Ernst Quotes - I’ve always liked the tension between spontaneous chaos and very resolved geometry.
Shepard Fairey Quotes - Success can be harmful, it makes you relax, you sit on it and are distracted.
Henri Fantin-Latour Quotes - The artist has to have a dialogue with what is being created.
Helen Frankenthaler Quotes - I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
Lucian Freud Quotes - When a great artist gets my attention, I pursue it. If I don’t, someone else will, you know what I’m saying?
Larry Gagosian Quotes - I wish you would recollect that Painting and Punctuality mix like Oil and Vinegar, and that Genius and regularity are utter Enemies.
Thomas Gainsborough Quotes - A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.
Paul Gauguin Quotes - I hate imitators, people who put works together out of older works, these men are blind unless they are looking with someone else’s eyes, and who produce only the mistakes of the master they draw from.
Jean-Leon Gerome Quotes - I began to do sculpture because that was precisely the realm in which I understood least. I couldn’t endure having it elude me completely. I had no choice.
Alberto Giacometti Quotes - I like creating useful things, things that serve a purpose.
Diego Giacometti Quotes - My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy. A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative… or they are crazy.
HR Giger Quotes - The line between ugly and beautiful is, like the equator, an imaginary line. In art its position varies with the viewer. For me, I doubt whether it exists at all. I doubt if it has any role to play in the search for the reality that lies beyond the apparent reality.
James Gleeson Quotes - They said it was immoral to take art when what was needed was food. That’s a very limited view of what is necessary for the spirit.
Antony Gormley Quotes - Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco Goya Quotes - Painting is manual labor, no different from any other. It can be done well or poorly.
George Grosz Quotes - There’s some mysterious process at work here, which I don’t even want to understand.
Philip Guston Quotes - Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
Keith Haring Quotes - What we had to remove ourselves from was clear; where we were heading was certainly less clear.
Erich Heckel Quotes - Sculpture, to me, is primitive, religious, passionate, and magical.
Barbara Hepworth Quotes - I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. I’ve found out there aren’t any. I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.
Damien Hirst Quotes - If any artist tells you he’s not having fun in his studio, there is something wrong with him.
David Hockney Quotes - If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy.
Ferdinand Hodler Quotes - The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
Hans Hofmann Quotes - The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.
Edward Hopper Quotes - Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object.
Robert Hughes Quotes - Color adds ornament to a painting; but it is nothing but the handmaiden, because all it does is to render more agreeable the true perfections of the art.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Quotes - I am now mainly painting faces and landscapes; I am obsessed day and night by the vision of faces and colors.
Alexej von Jawlensky Quotes - Every artist feels alone and isolated. Friends are very important in terms of all sorts of definitions of oneself.
Jasper Johns Quotes - I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.
Frida Kahlo Quotes - An empty canvas is a living wonder – far lovelier than certain pictures.
Wassily Kandinsky Quotes - A painting is a conglomeration of failings. But, we can say this of life also.
Anselm Kiefer Quotes - I am rather like a travelling salesman. I deal in ideas. I do much more for people than just paint them pictures.
Martin Kippenberger Quotes - A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes - Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
Paul Klee Quotes - There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night.
Gustav Klimt Quotes - If I feel a painting I’m working on doesn’t have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.
Franz Kline Quotes - I did batik at first, and then after doing that I learned more and more and then I changed over to painting for good. Then it was canvas. I gave up on fabric to avoid all the boiling to get the wax out. I got a bit lazy.
Emily Kngwarreye Quotes - I cannot say why I wanted to paint. The only answer is in the pictures themselves.
Oskar Kokoschka Quotes - I love art. I love how it can change your life. I go to my studio in the morning, I stay there until late evening, and I’m right back in there the next day, doing the things I love to do. Great artists always get better.
Jeff Koons Quotes - I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.
Lee Krasner Quotes - My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.
Yayoi Kusama Quotes - I try to get the student to appreciate form and shape, line, color, texture and space regardless of what the content may be. The content can be abstract or it can be figurative; figurative or non-figurative.
Jacob Lawrence Quotes - I continued to paint furiously, sometimes taking three sittings in the course of a single day.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun Quotes - Man needs color to live; it’s just as necessary an element as fire and water.
Fernand Leger Quotes - It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.
Leonardo da Vinci Quotes - I’m interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art.
Roy Lichtenstein Quotes - I don’t care a tuppence for what they do in London in the art world. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think of it. All I am concerned with is doing my own thing in my own way.. as well as I can.
LS Lowry Quotes - What others think about my pictures no longer interests me.
August Macke Quotes - Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.
Rene Magritte Quotes - One must be of one’s time and paint what one sees.
Edouard Manet Quotes - Only today can art be metaphysical, and it will continue to be so. Art will free itself from the needs and desires of men.
Franz Marc Quotes - After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
Henri Matisse Quotes - The Australian artist can best fulfil his highest destiny, by remaining in his own country and studying that which lies about him.
Frederick McCubbin Quotes - The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
Michelangelo Quotes - Work should always look as though it had been done with ease, however elaborate; what we see should appear to have been done without effort, whatever may be the agonies beneath the surface.
John Everett Millais Quotes - I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
Joan Miro Quotes - Pop Art, Op Art, Flop Art and Slop Art. I fall into the last two categories.
Joan Mitchell Quotes - What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.
Amedeo Modigliani Quotes - Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.
Piet Mondrian Quotes - Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.
Claude Monet Quotes - There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.
Henry Moore Quotes - I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.
Giorgio Morandi Quotes - I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that’s all I would have asked for, for I know I’m worth as much as they.
Berthe Morisot Quotes - The more anonymous a work, the less universal, because in some paradoxical way, we understand the universal through the personal. Robert Motherwell Quotes
- By painting colors and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does.
Edvard Munch Quotes - My desire is always to become a machine that produces artwork. A machine needs to be tuned and maintained, and it requires technical innovations.
Takashi Murakami Quotes - I think I should have full rights. I am fifty years old now and there are many things I would like to do and can’t without citizenship rights.
Albert Namatjira Quotes - I don’t care much about the audience and their reactions nowadays. It might be another effect of aging. What I wish now is that my works remain for, say, 200 years after my death.
Yoshimoto Nara Quotes - It’s a privilege, you know, to paint. It takes up a lot of time and it means there’s a lot of things you don’t do.
Alice Neel Quotes - Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
Odd Nerdrum Quotes - Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to the birds.
Barnett Newman Quotes - The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural.
Ben Nicholson Quotes - The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.
Isamu Noguchi Quotes - I’m compelled and dedicated to transmitting emotions and I care for very little else.
Sidney Nolan Quotes - Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them.
Emil Nolde Quotes - There’s nothing like walking into someone’s studio and seeing a painting for the first time. You get that rush of information coming at you, unmediated. The less you know beforehand, the purer the read.
Chris Ofili Quotes - I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.
Georgia O’Keeffe Quotes - When I am served a plate of food, I see shapes and forms, and I sometimes don’t know whether to eat the food or look at it.
Claus Oldenburg Quotes - It’s for the love of doing and if you knew you could do it, I suppose you wouldn’t do it. It is something to do with the challenge.
Margaret Olley Quotes - There are two types of people in this world – lovers and others, and you know what you can do with the others!
John Olsen Quotes - We were overjoyed to discover our complete unison in the urge for liberation, for an art surging forward, unrestricted by convention.
Max Pechstein Quotes - There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso Quotes - It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
Camille Pissarro Quotes - The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
Jackson Pollock Quotes - The colors in the paintings are like the illusions that convince the eyes, similar to the beauty of the verses in poetry.
Nicolas Poussin Quotes - Time is a vindictive bandit to steal the beauty of our former selves.
Raphael Quotes - I am always afraid of explaining what I am doing, because my mind works so perversely. If I know why I am doing something it immediately goes to another channel and I try not to do that anymore.
Robert Rauschenberg Quotes - Good drawing is expressive drawing. It reveals what the artist is thinking and feeling concerning his subject.
Lloyd Rees Quotes - I paint the women I know. I paint what I see. I make women the protagonists because I am one.
Paula Rego Quotes - A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished.
Rembrandt Quotes - I have no rules and no methods; any one can look over my materials or watch how I paint—he will see that I have no secrets.
Pierre August Renoir Quotes - Modern art has always only shown itself to me in trends and blowhards, so I couldn’t be a modern artist. There were always powerful movements or groups that today we don’t even know anymore.
Gerhard Richter Quotes - I’ve never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso.
Diego Rivera Quotes - It seems to me that one of the best ideas spoken to an artist is, ‘paint what you love and love what you paint’ and on that I have worked; so it came that being in the bush and feeling the delight and fascination of the great pastoral life and work, I have tried to express it.
Tom Roberts Quotes - I invent nothing, I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art; they take that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago.
Auguste Rodin Quotes - I was probably born with the ability to draw, but that does not make you an artist.
James Rosenquist Quotes - It is beautiful, the world, and life itself. I am glad I have lived.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti Quotes - I think artists almost always end up turning to what’s around them, what’s in their environment or outside their window.
Susan Rothenberg Quotes - It’s a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!
Mark Rothko Quotes - A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it—the artist’s thought, sensibility, and intensions.
Georges Rouault Quotes - I am by nature and inclination a peaceful man, the sworn enemy to disputes, lawsuits and quarrels both public and private.
Peter Paul Rubens Quotes - In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
John Ruskin Quotes - I don’t think of myself as making white paintings. I make paintings; I’m a painter. White paint is my medium. There’s a lot of color involved.
Robert Ryman Quotes - Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe when I’m painting.
Jenny Saville Quotes - Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.
Egon Schiele Quotes - The essence of art can never change. I’m convinced you can’t talk about art. At best, you will have a translation, a poetic paraphrase, and as for that I’ll leave that to the poets.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Quotes - They see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method and that is all there is to it.
Georges Seurat Quotes - I always do a lot of preliminary drawings, moving the forms, the shadows, the buildings the figures around the canvas till I get that perfect composition.
Jeffrey Smart Quotes - People often say my paintings have this clarity, this light, this grace, as if they have become windows onto something, protective of their own design.
Grace Cossington Smith Quotes - I only think about what I am going to do tomorrow and tomorrow, I want to paint.
Pierre Soulages Quotes - I sit here in the upper circle surrounded by copper and gold, and smile with joy under my fly net as all the light, glory and quivering brightness passes slowly and freely before my eyes.
Arthur Streeton Quotes - I don’t like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it’s hard to be old and like what goes on around you.
Frank Stella Quotes - The art world is not much interested in humor, to its disadvantage.
Wayne Thiebaud Quotes - It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.
Titian Quotes - I have always been a pencil.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Quotes - My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
JMW Turner Quotes - I sit for two or three hours and then in 15 minutes I can do a painting, but that’s part of it. You have to get ready and decide to jump up and do it; you build yourself up psychologically, and so painting has no time for brush. Brush is boring, you give it and all of a sudden it’s dry, you have to go. Before you cut the thought, you know?
Cy Twombly Quotes - My opinion is that the best thing would be to work on till art lovers feel drawn toward it of their own accord, instead of having to praise or to explain it.
Vincent van Gogh Quotes - We painters use the same license as poets and madmen.
Paolo Veronese Quotes - Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.
Maurice de Vlaminck Quotes - To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale.
Edouard Vuillard Quotes - Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
Andy Warhol Quotes - Expressing oneself is like a drug. I’m so addicted to it.
Ai Weiwei Quotes - If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.
James McNeill Whistler Quotes - Art is the thrilling spark that beats death – that’s all.
Brett Whiteley Quotes - I don’t want to give the impression that I love the bush, and because I love it I want other people to love it. I simply want to paint pictures from it.
Fred Williams Quotes - I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.
Grant Wood Quotes - When you leave the studio and think you’ve had a good day, you probably haven’t.
Christopher Wool Quotes - Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing.. then a work of art may happen. Andrew Wyeth Quotes
If you know of an art quote that you think should be on the big list of art quotes by famous artists then let us know in the comments below.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.