Quotes

"Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

From a book review of Art As Experience by John Dewey: The central theme is that life is an experience, and that the goal of art is to recapture that experience. Hence, a painting of a flower is only valuable in the way that it captures the essence of a flower, or the experience of viewing a flower. The viewing of a painting must also provide some of the experience of making that painting (its process).


Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender.
—  J.D. Salinger


'In antything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery


As Picasso pointed out, knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing how to paint.

Universally people just learning to paint make more interesting paintings when they’re looking at things. Paradoxically, they think they are being more true to themselves when they invent things.

— Harriet Shorr

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

—Henri Matisse 

There is little or nothing new in the world. What matters is the new and different position in which an artist finds herself seeing and considering the things of so-called nature and the works that have preceded and interested her.

— Giorgio Morand

"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."

— Thomas Watson

"I want the brain to intervene between the observation and the mark."

— Euan Uglow


"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

»A painting begins with an experience, an observation, a thought, a possibility, a fleeting idea caught in a drawn line connecting proximity and distance, artist and the physical world. I paint because I cannot forget, to halt the march of time, and to say: Look, this was a moment I did not want to let go.« ~ Robin d’Arcy Shillcock

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)


Not sure where I found these, or who said or wrote them, but wrote them in my notebook years ago...
"Success can only be defined  by the person achieving it. It has less to do with material wealth than it has with achievement, inner fulfillment, and artistic mastery." 

"Don't compare your life to others, you have no idea what their journey is all about."

"Learn to laugh at your mistakes and to admit your weaknesses. There is strength in one and humility in the other, and both, in doses, are a necessary part of the process."


On writing or talking too much about your artwork:
"We live in an age where everyone is bombarded with far too much information every day. There's not much point in adding to that when your work is supposed to provide relief, or shock, or contrast to those very elements of our lives. Let the work speak."


On hard work:
"Hard work will take you much further down the line than mere reliance on brilliance or talent. Often an average talent blossoms, over years, into earned brilliance, while born brilliance often recedes into mediocrity." 


I've got many more to come...