#artist

There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet. ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#artist #criticism #art

True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#artist #existence #experience #humanity #life

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own. ↗

— Alice Walker

#inspirational #life #vincent-van-gogh #inspirational

Jazz is democracy in music. ↗

— Wynton Marsalis

#patriotism #social-commentary #music

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. ↗

— Jennifer Birkett

#consumer #decadence #decadent #diginty #disempowerment

He’s a pagan! I’m an artist! We’re naturally sympathetic! ↗

— Sidney Howard

#creativity #pagan #nature

A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness. ↗

— Allen Ginsberg

#nature

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for? ↗

— William Saroyan

#artist #arts #art

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: "living & dying, we feed the fire. ↗

— Clive Barker

#creativity #writing #art

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist. ↗

— Federico Fellini

#cinema #metaphysics