Famous Artists Quotes About Art

Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes it visible.

~Paul Klee

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of mans mind.
~Leonardo Da Vinci

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
~Leonardo da Vinci

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
~Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
~Leonardo da Vinci

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.
~Leonardo da Vinci

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
~Leonardo da Vinci

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.
~Leonardo da Vinci

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
~Michelangelo Buonarroti

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
~Michelangelo Buonarroti

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
~Michelangelo Buonarroti

The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.
~Michelangelo Buonarroti

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
~Michelangelo Buonarroti

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.
~Michelangelo Buonarroti

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
~Claude Monet

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.
~Claude Monet

Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It’s wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.
~Claude Monet

While we sketched from a model, Gleyre criticized my work: ‘It is not too bad,’ he said, ‘but the breast is heavy, the shoulder is too powerful, and the foot too big.’ I can only draw what I see, I replied timidly.
~Claude Monet

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.
~Claude Monet

The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.
~Claude Monet

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
~Claude Monet

I’ve done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don’t want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that’s enough.
~Claude Monet

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
~Paul Gauguin

Art is either Plagiarism or revolution.
~Paul Gauguin

Many excellent cooks are spoiled by going into the arts.
~Paul Gauguin

How do you see this tree? Is it green? …Don’t be afraid to paint it as green as possible.
~Paul Gauguin

I shut my eyes in order to see.
~Paul Gauguin

I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream.
~Paul Gauguin

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
~Paul Gauguin

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
~Paul Gauguin

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
~Paul Klee

Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes it visible.
~Paul Klee

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
~Paul Klee

Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
~Paul Klee

It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that sacred ground where primal law feeds growth.
~Paul Klee

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

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.
~Paul Klee

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
~Paul Klee

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
~Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
~Pablo Picasso

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.
~ Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
~Pablo Picasso

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the signing of birds? People love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting – that they must understand.
~Pablo Picasso

Painting is a blind man profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
~Pablo Picasso

I paint objects as I think them, not as i see them.
~Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
~Pablo Picasso

Photographers, along with dentists, are two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
~Pablo Picasso

Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth.
~Pablo Picasso

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.
~Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
~Pablo Picasso

When I was a child, my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be the general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as pope.” Instead I became a painter and ended up as Picasso.
~Pablo Picasso

In an artist’s life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
~Vincent Van Gogh

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.
~Vincent van Gogh

One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.
~Vincent van Gogh

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.
~Vincent van Gogh

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
~Vincent Van Gogh

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
~Vincent van Gogh

There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
~Vincent van Gogh

If you hear a voice within you say „you cannot paint“, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.
~Vincent van Gogh

I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
~Vincent van Gogh

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