Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
- Oscar Wilde

"Whatya mean, you're outta Guinness?!!" DrayeArt to a bartender.

"How much would you charge to draw this tattoo for me? Can ya do it for less than a hunert?" Florida redneck to DrayeArt

"There in that closet over there, behind the mop bucket." Alternative gallery owner giving directions as to where DrayeArt may retrieve his artwork.

"I'm sorry. Your artwork doesn't fit our particular niche!" Starving Artist gallery "curator" to DrayeArt.

"Your artwork seems so downbeat and depressing." Guest at art show to DrayeArt (see above quotes for nature of my reply)

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.

and

I don’t think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.
~Francis Bacon

The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existense.
~Brett Whiteley

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
~ Edgar Degas

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
~ Albert Einstein

There is no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way.
~ Winslow Homer

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

I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.
~Francis Ford Coppola

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
~Pablo Picasso

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
~Albert Einstein

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
~William Faulkner quotes

Nice one Virginia!
I'll have to look at oscar wilde again He's one that slips through the net I take him for granted
should'nt do that should I
Thanks for sharing

I can't forget him even if I was crazy and actually wanted too. I'm a theatre major. XD

"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."
- John F. Kenndy

"Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it."
- Salvador Dali

"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity."
- Francis Bacon

"No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time."
- Martha Graham

I really like the quote by Martha Graham.

Me too! (Ignore the fact that I wouldn't have posted it if I didn't.) It can really apply to a lot of artists who didn't understand those we now consider great.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
~Duke Ellington

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
~Frank Zappa

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
~Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.
~Ward Jenkins

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.
~Edmond and Jules De Goncour

I repeat, supposing that like the bulb trade at the end of the last century, so the art trade, along with other branches of speculation at the end of this century, will disappear as they came, namely rather quickly. The bulb trade may disappear - the flower-growing remains. And I for myself am contented, for better or for worse, to be a small gardener, who loves his plants.
~Vincent Van Gogh

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
~Einstein

Though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living. It makes living, living. It makes starving, living. It makes worry, it makes trouble, it makes a life that would be barren of everything -- living. It brings life to life.
~
John Sloan

What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently.
~Vincent Van Gogh


It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him." ... "The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well." ... "Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.
~Robert Henri

you don't paint the way someone, by observing your life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to in order to give, that's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.
~Franz Kline

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
~Albert Einstein

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
~Leonardo da Vinci

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
~Anais Nin

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
~Willa Cather

"good design doesn't happen over breakfast."
milt glaser

I am doubtful of any talent, so whatever I choose to be, will be accomplished only by long study and work
~ Jackson Pollock

Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50.
~Edgar Degas

Talent is so loaded a word, so full to the brim with meanings, that an artist might be wise to forget about it altogether and just keep on working.
~Eric Maisel

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.”
~James Baldwin

It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.”
~ Pablo Picasso

To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”
~ Elbert Hubbard

“Creativity takes courage.”
~Henri Matisse

Art is the thrilling spark that beats death - thats all.

I can't stand mindless purity - I have soaked myself in scepticism and am by nature magnetised to bitterness.

~Brett Whiteley

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Somtimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.
~Edvard Munch

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.
~Joan Miro

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
~Vincent Van Gogh

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

Look here, I often feel the same in more than one respect--not just in financial things, but in art itself, and in life in general. But do you think it's anything exceptional? Don't you think every man with a little spirit and energy has those moments? Moments of melancholy, of distress, of anguish--I think we all have them to a greater or lesser extent, and it is a condition of every conscious human life. It seems that some people have no consciousness of self. But for all that, those who have it may sometimes be in distress, they are not unhappy, nor is the distress anything exceptional.
~Vincent Van Gogh

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
~Ernest Hemingway

In the tenth grade, I was fascinated with the question 'what was immortality?' I read numerous philosophies, but the theory which has stayed with me was that of Plato, the Symposium. The idea that through Love and Beauty we achieve immortality. Putting all our soul into our work makes it not only alive with passion and emotion, but it also exists as one of the truest and most honest expressions of self. Making life a beautiful art, the art then retaining life. I still believe Beauty is one of those most important and difficult things to create and express.
~Jewel Kilcher

The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it... did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.
~ Heinrich Heine

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
~Albert Einstein

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

and finally my favorite of the day!!!

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
~Confucius

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
~Pablo Picasso

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?
!Howard Ikemoto

In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.
~Henri de Toulouse Lautrec