Quotes by Painters - Page 20

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
Mark Rothko
The dialectic case of the 'things we do', the 'things we have done' and the 'things we are going to do' has been haunting present and earlier generations. For ages people have been confronted with the soul-searching question how should I interpret the past and how do I move forward. Linguistic sayings, which were inherited from century to century, gave us a good deal of remarkable advice and moral guidance in this field : " Do what is right and let come what come may ", " Do well and fear not ", " Do well and dread no shame ".Erik Pevernagie, Never looking back again
Erik Pevernagie
There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.
Bruno Schulz
Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation
Robert Motherwell
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
William Blake
Enthusiasm for one's goal lessens the disagreeableness of working toward it.
Thomas Eakins
there's time for laughing and there's time for crying— for hoping for despair for peace for longing —a time for growing and a time for dying: a night for silence and a day for singingbut more than all(as all your more than eyes tell me)there is a time for timelessness
E.E. Cummings
Is happiness a sort of blissful state of mind or just a kind of surreal propensity? It may be hard to recognize its very nature, if we remain guilelessly confined in a state of woeful unawareness or in a no-man’s-land of emotions. In their dogged and obstinate quest for the zenith of happiness, many forget to take pleasure in the small things of everyday and, thus, become disgruntled and depressed instead, which leads them to a mire of gloom. ("C’est quand le bonheur “)
Erik Pevernagie
There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.
Rabih Alameddine
Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. ("Fish for silence.")
Erik Pevernagie
Never so sure our rapture to createAs when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.
William Hazlitt
We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. (“Disruption”)
Erik Pevernagie
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
Edvard Munch
But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.
John Berger
Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. ("Absence of beauty was like hell")
Erik Pevernagie
Had I known that coffee could taste so good, I would have gotten drunk on it every day.
Rabih Alameddine
If we misread the blueprint of our life, we need not be ashamed of backtracking on our chosen options. Admitting to mistakes may make us human and maybe great again. ("Sisyphus' hardship on the hill")
Erik Pevernagie
Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?
Henry Miller
Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.
Henry Miller
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
William Hazlitt
Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.
Egon Schiele
Tell me, Anna, if man is capable of projecting his belief onto the cosmos, isn't it possible by the same token, that he can project his unbelief onto the cosmos?
Michael D. O'Brien
But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are
Anna Kavan
..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn't want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn't interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.
Natalie Goldberg
People live on the flow of the daily reality and they surge on the waves of hazy expectations. They can experience pleasant junctures and try to catch and enjoy each special moment that is offered to them. Until life takes them by surprise.
Erik Pevernagie
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Love is blind. Love of money is blind. Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles. ( "Money rocking and rolling" )
Erik Pevernagie
Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.
Robert Henri
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find
William Blake
The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
William Hazlitt
To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake
But, despite everything, it was almost a pleasure to suffer those torments. I had crawled through life blindly and dully for so long, my heart had kept silent and had sat, impoverished, in a corner for so long, that even these self accusations, this horror, this whole ghastly emotion in my soul was welcome. After all, it was an emotion, flames were still rising, it showed that my heart was still alive! In a confused way, in the midst of misery I felt something like liberation and springtime.
Herman Hesse
I have no sympathy with the belief that art is the restricted province of those who paint, sculpt, make music and verse. I hope we will come to an understanding that the material used is only incidental, that there is artist in every man; and that to him the possibility of development and of expression and the happiness of creation is as much a right and as much a duty to himself, as to any of those who work in the especially ticketed ways.
Robert Henri
When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )
Erik Pevernagie
I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Art is much less important than life but what a poor life without it.
Robert Motherwell
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
Henry Miller
In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci")
Clark Ashton Smith
The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered : humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. (“Buying now, dying later”)
Erik Pevernagie
One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.
Henry Miller
You must study the Masters but guard the original style that beats within your soul and put to sword those who would try to steal it.
El Greco
In search of love and music my whole life has beenIlluminationCorruptionAnd diving, diving, diving, diving down To pick up on every shiny thing
Joni Mitchell
A truth that's told with bad intent - beats all the lies you can invent.
William Blake
We create our fate every day we live.
Henry Miller
...and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.
Natalie Goldberg
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
Georgia O'Keeffe
When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ("Another empty room")
Erik Pevernagie
Preachers love only their own voices.
John Berger
Some men can be good ' horse whisperers ' and many dogs can be wonderful ' man whisperers '.
Erik Pevernagie
What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?
Rabih Alameddine
When we stay locked up in the spectrum of unsolved life stories and keep hiding in an arcane prism, life remains a mystery behind perpetual tensions and a journey in a world beyond appearances. (“Une femme peut en cacher une autre")
Erik Pevernagie
It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings—joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile.
Vincent van Gogh
We are troubled by having two selves, the inner and the outer. The outer one is rather dull and lets great things go by.
Robert Henri
Love is friendship set to music.
Jackson Pollock
A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
Robert Henri
When love is roaming in our mind, looping in the deepest fringes of our heart, undreamt spaciousness emerges, repealing the constraints of triviality and letting stifling narrowness fade away. While our mindset is besieged by a revolving burst of emotion, our world is ultimately opening up. (Cape of good hope)
Erik Pevernagie
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
Giorgio de Chirico