Artwork Quotes

“One false step, and you’ll fall all the way to Tartarus—and believe me, unlike the Doors of Death, this would be a one-way trip, a very hard fall! I will not have you dying before you tell me your plan for my artwork.”
― Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena

“It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“You were born an original work of art. Stay original.”
― Suzy Kassem

“In fabricating equipment—e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work's world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the lighting and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word.”
― Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

“The memory of human blood manifests now as a kind of visceral reaction to seeing people's veins and their necks. The skin on a neck appears to me as different from the skin anywhere else on a body. It seems as thin and consumable as rice paper wrapped around a sweet. It is too blank compared with skin everywhere else, as though it is asking to have marks made on it, like very expensive calligraphy paper, or cold-pressed Fabriano. Often, I wonder whether the urge I have to make art is the same as the urge to consume and destroy the blankness of a human neck. While at art college, I read that the best paper used by artists in the seventeenth century was made from the skins of lamb fetuses. This skin was soft and absorbent, and had an even texture right across its surface. For a long time, the process of creating art has been linked to the killing of living things. My dad, even, used fine silk stretched across wooden frames in his own work as a painter. Once, when we still had some of his pieces, I looked at the odd geometric shapes he created on a huge sheet and thought about all the silkworms who had had their cocoons torn open before they were able to become moths.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I’ve seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it,” Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency?”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“People were always most interested in things that didn't have anything useful to tell them. I had no idea why.”
― Santosh Kalwar, The Society In Opposition To Everything

“Your art is creating your future.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“Artists are low key astronauts.
Instead of going to the moon, they sit back in their studio and make the moon.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Umělecký čin je únik z otroctví času, vyklouznutí člověka z bahna jeho pudů a lenosti do jiné roviny, do bezčasí, do osvobození od času, do božskosti, do naprosté bezdějinnosti a protidějinnosti.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“The lost nobility of the artwork and of its natural spirit stems from the immoderate love of the people for anecdotes and juicy details.”
― Pierre Taminiaux, The Paradox of Photography

“Aliens (intermediate programmers) are not creating computer games in the ordinary sense of the term. These games are more like works of art, improvisational theater, performance art, scientific and philosophic investigation and historical novels.”
― Laurence Galian, Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!

“Water can be drawn from a well, or drawn on a sheet of paper.
Art, in whatever form, is art.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Not every piece should be a masterpiece”
― raouf mxs

“It was summer, so the sun appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of the big window at quarter past six.
Ish.
It was hard to tell exactly until the sun rose just a little bit more, enough to send his beams through the holes carefully bored through a piece of wood, above which the hours were marked off in beautifully painted flourishes. This simple timepiece hung from the ceiling off a stick hammered sturdily in, because a string would have let it spin and therefore fail its task of tracking the sun.
The wind chimes, however, assembled from more bits of wood, and pieces of metal, and shaped and dried bits of pottery, were free to swing and tinkle as they pleased. These were surrounded by celestial bric-a-brac that also dangled from the ceiling and spun with abandon when the breeze found them: paper-mâché stars, comets of hoarded glass shards and mirror, a very carefully re-created (and golden) replica of the constellation Orion, a quilted and embroidered cloth model of the sun, and several paintings on rectangular panels hung such that they faced straight down. So that the viewer, in bed, might look up at them and pretend they were windows or friends, depending on whether the subject was landscapes or faces.”
― Liz Braswell, What Once Was Mine

“With deeper awareness, our art reveals what energies we are bringing into our lives, as well as what we need to heal.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“Putting art on the walls of your home or body is a very important decision to make, and one not to be taken lightly. Whenever you are in the presence of a single piece of art, you are absorbing the various energies that it radiates.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“Proximity to the image is especially important, which is why tattoos have a far bigger influence on our lives than a print hanging on the living room walls, for example.

Images are like friends. If we are next to a sad friend, we are more likely to become sad if he or she is in the same room with us, and less likely to be impacted if that friend is a mile away.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“Art is spiritual alchemy. It necessitates being completely open to new ideas, just as your playful inner child is inside of you. And it also requires that you are willing to look at what is working and what is not working so well in your life.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“The beauty of the garden had inspired her art, her attempts to revitalize and preserve the city and redefine it for new generations. But she never imagined the inverse may also hold true. That her art might come to life.
And paint became nectar in a new, beautiful promise.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Kit smiled a little as he bent to retrieve the abandoned sketchbook; the irony of a spy being spied upon didn't escape him. He leafed through it idly.
Imagine that... she'd not only been spying... she'd been documenting her findings.
He bit back a laugh when he saw himself, arms stretched skyward, penis dangling modestly---he had been swimming, after all. But it was a beautiful drawing. She'd roughed in the pier beneath him and the trees behind it, too, and she'd caught him perfectly, the mindless contentment of the moment, the strength and confidence of his body, a hint of pleased-with-himself arrogance in the arch of his back. There was nothing tentative or missish about the drawing; it was, above all things, honest and surprisingly accomplished. He was flattered, but he felt oddly exposed, which had nothing to do with the fact that he was naked in the sketch. She'd captured something essential about him.”
― Julie Anne Long, Beauty and the Spy

“She'd completed a small still life in oils, her first time experimenting with anything save watercolors, and she was rather proud of it. She'd plied the light just as she'd wanted, illuminating a scatter of ephemera, fraying silk and loose buttons and bits of worn glass. On a whim, she had painted one of her straw glamours, the wreath presiding over the gentle chaos.”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“I know you don't understand what I do."
"That... might be true," he admitted. He touched the top of Manor House's roof with his right index finger. "But that does not mean I do not find it fascinating."
I watched as he traced over every single line on the page, from top to bottom, not skipping over any part of it, with deliberate care. The house. The lake. The barely intimated trees blooming as rough graphite swirls on either side of the page. The memories of his large hand covering mine as we explored Instagram together--- the way my hands had looked pressed up against his chest in the Nordstrom dressing room--- rose unbidden, sending a delicious shiver down my spine.
I'd always felt my art was an extension of my innermost self, and the sight of his large, graceful hands touching every single part of this early drawing felt almost unbearably intimate.
"What do you find fascinating about it?" I couldn't tear my eyes away from the sight of his hands touching my work. I felt moments away from melting into a puddle at his feet.
"All of it." His hand left the page. I felt him withdraw as much as saw it and exhaled for the first time in what felt like minutes. An unexpected, indescribable feeling of emptiness coursed through me. "I do not claim to understand what you see when you draw and build these things. But the intricacy of your detailing suggests that whatever it is, it is big and deliberate. This is intentional. It means something to you. I cannot help but respect it.”
― Jenna Levine, My Roommate Is a Vampire

“A lot of people do not value art. Rather than admit they don’t understand it, they tend to trivialise it.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Don’t think about whether the artwork or exhibit appeals … think about the emotion it stirs within you.”
― Lisa Medved, The Engraver's Secret

“Despite it being a preliminary drawing, the execution is first-rate, the style exceptional. Clean lines, controlled proficiency, a master’s touch. Expert blending of light into shade. Chiaroscuro at its finest.”
― Lisa Medved, The Engraver's Secret

“You can find gods signature in the artwork of nature.”
― Natasha Potter

“If you look long enough, you'll find that god hides in nature.”
― Natasha Potter

“The overall best is created when what is created is created just for the sheer fun of creating.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Burn Like Fire