I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.
...It is a well known fact that most artists produce their best work early in their career. They may refine what they do but you usually get the measure of what they are about on their first outing.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.
She is a famous artists' model who claims to have been christened Topaz - even if this is true there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that.
I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are.
The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface
Her secret? It is every artist's secret--passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.
My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist.
An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.
Some artists are normal people who just happen to make things because we can't figure out how in the hell to communicate with people.
Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.
As artists give themselves to their models, and poets to their classical pursuits, so must we addict ourselves to prayer.
If a musician wants to become a fine artist, he must first become a finer person.
How does one balance the fallen and redeemed aspects of life in the artistic portrayal of human experience in the world?
