|
"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,
and paints his own nature into his pictures."
— Henry Ward Beecher
|
When great artists come to mind, we typically think of the products that have made them famous—the paintings, the sculpture, the photographs, and so forth. But in addition to the media we normally associate with
giants of the art world, there is one additional medium they have all used to express themselves—words and language. And happily for quotation lovers, their descriptions of the art world are often so creative they can be considered artistic creations as well:
|
"Art washes away from the soul.
the dust of everyday life."
— Pablo Picasso
|
In the observation, Picasso elegantly integrates two domains not usually linked, the artistic domain and the world of cleansing and personal hygiene. In my view, it is one of the most memorable observations ever made about artistic creations—we
value them in part because they are aesthetically pleasing, but also because they help to relieve the boredom and the burdens of everyday life.
The underlying sentiment about the cleansing power of art is not original with Picasso. In his 1891 book Over the Teacups, the celebrated American essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes offered this impressive analogy:
|
"Take a music-bath once or twice a week
for a few seasons,
and you will find that it is to the soul
what the water-bath is to the body."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
|
Below you will find a variety of analogies, metaphors, and similes on the nature of art and on such specific artistic endeavors as painting, sculpture, photography, dancing, and music. If you would like to see an equally beautiful—but much larger—collection of metaphorical
observations on such topics as love, sex, marriage & family life, politics, stage & screen, the human condition, sports, the literary life, and other topics, please see my I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like book.
And if you have a favorite metaphorical observation that doesn't appear below, please contact Dr. Mardy.
|
"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score,
and the print the performance."
Ansel Adams
|
|
"The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe,
as light as animal footprints on snow."
Hans Arp
|
|
"Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant,
or a child in its mother's womb."
Jean Arp
|
|
"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead."
W. H. Auden
|
|
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
All artists, if they are to survive,
are forced at last to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up."
James Baldwin
|
|
"What is art? Nature concentrated."
Honoré de Balzac
|
|
"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."
Francis Bacon
|
|
"Do not imagine that Art is something
which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence.
Art is not a brassiere. At least not in the English sense.
But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket."
Julian Barnes
|
|
"The study of the beautiful is a duel in which
the artist cries out with terror before he is vanquished."
Charles Baudelaire
|
|
"A work of art should be like a well-planned crime."
Constantin Brancusi
|
|
Edgar Degas is credited with a similar observation: "A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime." And Twyla Tharp extended the metaphor to a whole new arena:
"Dancing is like bank robbery. It takes split second timing."
|
|
"Art is not a mirror to reflect reality,
but a hammer with which to shape it."
Bertolt Brecht
|
|
"Art is a partnership not only between those who are living
but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born."
Edmund Burke
|
|
"Music is a means of rapid transportation."
John Cage
|
|
"If I were called on to define briefly the word 'art,'
I should call it the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature,
seen through the veil of the soul."
Paul Cézanne
|
|
"One must always be careful
not to let one's work be covered with moss."
Marc Chagall
|
|
"Art is Nature speeded up and God slowed down."
Malcolm de Chazal
|
|
"Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty."
Winston Churchill
|
|
"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.
Without innovation, it is a corpse."
Winston Churchill
|
|
"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."
Jean Cocteau
|
|
"Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood."
Jean Cocteau
|
|
"Painting is the intermediate something
between a thought and a thing."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
|
|
"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication:
that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."
Cyril Connolly
|
|
"Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it."
Robertson Davies
|
|
"Art is the accomplice of love.
Take love away and there is no longer art."
Remy de Gourmont
|
|
"Painting is only a bridge
linking the painter's mind with that of the viewer."
Eugène Delacroix
|
|
"Painting is the trade that takes the longest to learn
and is the most difficult.
It demands erudition like that of the composer,
but it also demands execution like that of the violinist."
Eugène Delacroix
|
|
"As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization,
neither art nor civilization is secure."
John Dewey
|
|
"Art is the stored honey of the human soul,
gathered on wings of misery and travail."
Theodore Dreiser
|
|
"The life of an artist is like the life of a monk,
a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian."
Marcel Duchamp
|
|
"I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug.
That's all it is, for the artist,
for the collector, for anybody connected with it."
Marcel Duchamp
|
|
"There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat,
grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and everyday."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
"Art is the path of the creator to his work."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
"Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man
have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy,
he makes a bad husband and an ill provider."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
A jealous mistress, of course, wants her lover all to herself—completely and totally. George Bernard Shaw echoed the sentiment in Man and Superman: "The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for
his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art." And William Faulkner similarly observed: "The artist's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode to a
Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."
|
|
"The artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Like the bees,
they must put their lives into the sting they give."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
"I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works."
Max Ernst
|
|
"All art is autobiographical;
the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."
Federico Fellini
|
|
"The artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature."
Gustave Flaubert
|
|
"I see the way of the artist as a kind of pilgrimage.
When you go on a pilgrimage, you set out from where you happen to be
and start walking toward a place of great sanctity
in hope of returning from it renewed, enriched, and sanctified.
However far you may walk, every pilgrimage
is a safari into your own dark interior, an inner journey.
For pilgrimages belong to the inner world,
to that realm called 'the religious.'"
Frederick Franck, in Art as a Way (1981)
|
|
"Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods,
listening to itself and to everything around it,
unsure of itself, waiting to pounce."
John W. Gardner
|
|
"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."
Paul Gauguin
|
|
"Art is a step in the Known toward the unknown."
Kahlil Gibran
|
|
"Good composition is like a suspension bridge—
each line adds strength and takes none away."
Robert Henri
|
|
"Art is, after all, only a trace—
like a footprint which shows that
one has walked bravely and in great happiness."
Robert Henri
|
|
"Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity."
Henry James
|
|
"Color is the keyboard,
the eyes are the hammers,
the soul is the piano with many strings.
The artist is the hand that plays,
touching one key or another purposively,
to cause vibrations in the soul."
Wassily Kandinsky
|
|
"Art, that great undogmatized church."
Ellen Key
|
|
"The pencil should take a walk."
Paul Klee
|
|
"The artist is the only one who can
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
Walter Kuhn
|
|
"Art is a form of religion,
minus the Ten Commandments business."
D. H. Lawrence
|
|
"An art book is a museum without walls."
André Malraux
|
|
"Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales,
and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets,
a painter is not primarily a person
who responds to figures and landscapes.
He is primarily one who loves pictures."
André Malraux
|
|
"Every time I paint, I throw myself into the water
in order to learn how to swim."
Édouard Manet
|
|
"Art at its most significant
is a Distant Early Warning System
that can always be relied on
to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."
Marshall McLuhan
|
|
"Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul."
Henri Matisse
|
|
"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture
with the advantage of permanence."
Henri Matisse
|
|
"All my colors sing together like a chord in music."
Henri Matisse
|
|
"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul.
It is his nature to create
as it is the nature of water to run down the hill."
W. Somerset Maugham
|
|
"Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do.
What the budding artist needs
is the privilege of wrestling with his problems in solitude—
and now and then a piece of red meat."
Henry Miller
|
|
"The painting rises from the brushstrokes
as a poem rises from the words.
The meaning comes later."
Joan Miró
|
|
"I try to apply colors like words that shape poems,
like notes that shape music."
Joan Miró
|
|
"Just as Leonardo da Vinci
studied human anatomy and dissected corpses,
so I try to dissect souls."
Edvard Munch
|
|
"All artists dream of a silence which they must enter,
as some creatures return to the sea to spawn."
Iris Murdoch
|
|
"Art is the sex of the imagination."
George Jean Nathan
|
|
"All art is a kind of subconscious madness
expressed in terms of sanity."
George Jean Nathan
|
|
"At my easel I'm as happy as a cow in her stall."
Louise Nevelson
|
|
"I think most artists create out of despair.
You know, when you're pregnant,
there are the physical pains of labor in nature.
But if labor pain is for physical birth,
then there is a psychic pain and spiritual pain for creation."
Louise Nevelson
|
|
"Art is a form of catharsis."
Dorothy Parker
|
|
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
Pablo Picasso
|
|
"A work of art that contains theories
is like an object on which the price tag has been left."
Marcel Proust
|
|
"Art is a kind of illness."
Giacomo Puccini
|
|
"I've been forty years discovering
that the Queen of all colors is black."
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
|
|
"The work of art must seize upon you,
wrap you up in itself and carry you away.
It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion.
It is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion."
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
|
|
"The artist must create a spark
before he can make a fire and before art is born,
the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation."
Auguste Rodin
|
|
"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—
the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others,
but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."
John Ruskin
|
|
"What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art."
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
|
|
"You use a glass mirror to see your face;
you use works of art to see your soul."
George Bernard Shaw
|
|
"Art is the signature of civilizations."
Beverly Sills
|
|
"A painter paints pictures on canvas.
But musicians paint their pictures on silence."
Leopold Stokowski
|
|
"One has a nose.
The nose scents and it chooses.
An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles."
Igor Stravinsky
|
|
"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
Twyla Tharp
|
|
"To say that a work of art is good,
but incomprehensible to the majority of men,
is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good
but that most people can't eat it."
Leo Tolstoy
|
|
"Art is like baby shoes.
When you coat them with gold,
they can no longer be worn."
John Updike
|
|
"The arts 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."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
|
|
"Most works of art, like most wines,
ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."
Rebecca West
|
|
"As music is the poetry of sound,
so is painting the poetry of sight."
James McNeill Whistler
|
|
"I've always thought of portrait painters as unlicensed psychiatrists,
using their eyes instead of their ears to read the human heart."
William Zinsser
|
|
Biography
