Here's a collection of famous artist quotes that inspire. Many of them are well-known artists of their days and in our times.
Slowly savor these quotes that contain a part of their inner vision, insights, encouragement immortalized in words.
Whether you are an artist or someone seeking to understand a bit more of these great artists, these quotes will inspire, motivate and encourage.
May you always spend some time creating something, be it a piece of painting, writing a novel, or designing a card, to share with others a little of your unique or quirky interpretation of life!
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
-- Camille Pissarro
Creativity takes courage.
-- Henri Matisse
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
-- Pablo Picasso
Everyone reaches a point in their life where they must either change or cease.
-- Brett Whiteley
Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it.
-- Salvador Dali
I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns.. your thought process goes on.
-- Georg Baselitz
I do hope I play out the contradictions that I feel, all the anxieties and dilemmas. If they're there in the work, then that's brilliant.
-- Jenny Saville
I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.
-- Claude Monet
I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.
-- Jeff Koons
I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.'
-- Vincent Van Gogh
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
-- Michelangelo
Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other peopleā€™s plates.
-- Francis Bacon
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
-- Marc Chagall
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like achild.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
-- Claude Monet
My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.
-- Joan Miro
My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
-- Keith Haring
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing.. they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
-- Rene Magritte
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
-- Edward Hopper
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.
-- Marc Chagall
One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.
-- Auguste Renoir
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.
-- Philip Guston
Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.
-- Frida Kahlo
So I said to myself, I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
-- Georgia O'Keeffe
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spiderā€™s web.
-- Pablo Picasso
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
-- Francis Bacon
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
-- Salvador Dali
To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.
-- Georgia O'Keeffe
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
-- Georgia O'Keeffe
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
-- Salvador Dali
If you just can't get yourself to do what you need to do, if your willpower and persistence always seems to fizzle out, I've found a way to change our minute-by-minute thoughts. Find out more here.
Back to Famous Quotes
Return from Artist Quotes to Home
