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Expression in words provokes thought, while expression in paint generates experience. (Kristin Abraham)
I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it. (Kathy Acker)
My paint is an expression of myself, an extension of what I am feeling at the time. We are never separate from the process. In all of my work, there is a part of myself. No matter if it''s a landscape, a portrait, or an abstract, I am lurking in the background. (Lori Agostino)
The aim of our studies is to prove that color is the most relative means of artistic expression. (Josef Albers)
Art is not so much expressing oneself, as it is discovering oneself. (Anawanitia)
Impulse alone does not make a work of art. (Pietro Annigoni)
When an artist is more concerned with what is said than how it is said there is no art. (Anonymous)
Asking art to express ideas is like asking a Sumo wrestler to play charades. (Darby Bannard)
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. (Simone de Beauvoir)
Visual journaling allows us to access our inner language of imagery and express it both verbally and visually, while exploring the connection between image and word. (Michael Bell)
Understate and over-prove. (Frank Bettger)
- interview (videoview) of Beuys by Willoughby Sharp...
If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren't very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it. (Joseph Beuys)
There is something of the essence of creative expression that informs and transcends all its manifestations – and when you touch it – magic! (Annie Bevan)
A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things. (Reginald H. Blyth)
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. (Niels Bohr)
Man needs spiritual expression and nourishing... even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. (Fernando Botero)
The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means. (David Bowie)
A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. (Alexey Brodovitch)
An artist who makes pictures that look good but express nothing is like a writer whose words sound good but have no meaning. (Gerald Brommer)
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment. (Pearl S. Buck)
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves. (Gautama Buddha)
Expression is the mystery of beauty. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell. (Octavia E. Butler)
Expression is the essence of thought. (Tony Calderone)
A work of art in paint should be beautiful and expressive as abstract colour and form and should not interest us necessarily in any 'story' outside of itself – or else it belongs to the field of illustration. (John F. Carlson)
There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life. (Emily Carr)
I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter. (Jim Carrey)
Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible. (Paul Cezanne)
One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression. (Paul Cezanne)
The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired. (Gustave Courbet)
The musician's power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience. (Matthew B. Crawford)
Find a way to express what moves you. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed the deeper they burn. (John Dryden)
To be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form: it must come, not in from without but out from within. (Meister Johann Eckhart)
The only thing better than singing is more singing. (Ella Fitzgerald)
- b.1899 - d.1971...
Art as therapy produces bad art. (James Fitzgerald)
Our self-expression is meant to be a manifestation of the silence of our hearts. (Matthew Fox)
The inexpressible is the only thing that is worthwhile. (Jerome Frank)
-interview with Susan Easton Black...
The muscularity in my paintings is only an expression of the spirit within. When I paint Nephi, I'm painting the interior, the greatness, the largeness of spirit. Who knows what he looked like? I'm painting a man who looks like he could actually do what Nephi did. (Arnold Friberg)
What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. (Naum Gabo)
Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert. (Frank Gehry)
I work in a meditative manner. My visual language is pulled from my unconscious and I express in my work what I cannot express with words. (Pat Gentenaar-Torley)
I think art is about human existence. Almost by default I'm expressing my experiences as a human. (Robert Gober)
To express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of Kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of light tone against a somber background; to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. (Vincent van Gogh)
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution. (Emma Goldman)
There have been times when I have found it easier to express what I have seen in the landscape in words rather than paint. (Lawrence Gowing)
I try to express myself with the most forceful personal statements possible. I reject that which is contrary to my own nature regardless of popular fashion. (George De Groat)
At the end of your brush is the the tip of your soul. (Andrew Hamilton)
Living a life of service, rather than one of expression, is a serious mistake, because expressing who we really are is the greatest service we can perform. (Kurt Hanks)
Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself - that is the concern of the individualist. (Marsden Hartley)
Everything we feel deeply must be expressed. (Hans Hartung)
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation. (Georg Wilhelm Hegel)
A picture should be the expression of the will of the painter. (Robert Henri)
Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure. (Robert Henri)
Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality. (Jim Hodges)
The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive. (Hans Hofmann)
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life. (Charles Ives)
Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. (Charles Ives)
Technicalities are but means employed by the artist in expressing what he has to say, and it is the expression that counts. (Edward Alden Jewell)
If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression. (Asger Jorn)
The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought. (Asger Jorn)
To be true to an idea, you have to value expression over perfection, vitality over finish, movement over the static, and form over function. (Rod Judkins)
Content starts with an artist's reaction to a subject and develops into an expression of their relationship with, vision of, and emotions and attitude toward their subject. (Joyce Kamikura)
Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it's my role as an artist to bring to expression, it's not my role to be expressive. (Anish Kapoor)
If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you have a a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn't the alphabet that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression. (Andre Kertesz)
Life is an attitude. Art is an expression of life. Ideally, art as well as life should be the greatest expression possible from us as individuals. (Bobbie Kilpatrick)
People seem to worry about self-expression that is somehow too personal... Art has always been personal. (Bonnie Sherr Klein)
I would describe my work as expressionist. The expressionist point of view is stressing your own feelings about something. (Jacob Lawrence)
Creative expression is not just a means of getting attention, although some have approached art that way. Think of art as a way of connecting, of sharing your insights with others. (Nita Leland)
Any work of art can be looked at as a series of decisions made about problems that you give yourself about how to express a certain idea. (John Leon)
-directed to student, 1961...
Lets see more of you and less of the pineapple! (Corban LePell)
I like to express the whole impact of an experience, rather than one specific memory. (Nancy Livesay)
I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment. (Marcel Marceau)
Success in any endeavor depends on the degree to which it is an expression of your true self. (Ralph Marston)
My painting is like no other. It is an expression from my spirit and soul. It is who I really am. (Billie F. Mathis)
I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. (Henri Matisse)
Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive. (Henri Matisse)
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. (W. Somerset Maugham)
If the artist has worked with sufficient concentration over the years, he finds that for the most part he is 'at home' – at his most humble, unpretending, best, most honest – in one particular manner of expression. (Elza Mayhew)
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie. (Agnes de Mille)
What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? (Charles Mingus)
As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche. (Joan Miro)
How happy I would be if I could give figurative expression to the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly within me. (Paula Modersohn-Becker)
In a way, the blank canvas... represents the infinity of trying to use color to express emotions – to assign a linguistic function to color. (Guido Molinari)
Everything is expressed through relationships. (Piet Mondrian)
Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. (Thelonius Monk)
The art of love or art for art's sake – a human being's greatest gift is self-expression... What is the art of anything without it? (Brad Michael Moore)
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses. (Henry Moore)
It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience. (Berthe Morisot)
In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential. (Robert Motherwell)
Such expression, such passion for life
may emerge in written, spoken, graphic
or asethetic forms in relation or in isolation;
in I-Thou enounters; and in silent, inner experience. (Clark Moustakas)
If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength ... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it. (Edvard Munch)
- Free Play: Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art...
When people ask me how to improvise, only a little of what I can say is about music. The real story is about spontaneous expression, and it is therefore a spiritual and a psychological story rather than a story about the technique of one art form or another. (Stephen Nachmanovitch)
Picasso has been my inspiration, expressing himself in a hundred different ways. (Robert Lyn Nelson)
I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves. (Barnett Newman)
I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do – no matter who they are. Isn't it enough just to express yourself? (Georgia O'Keeffe)
I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
The camera always points both ways. In expressing your subject, you also express yourself. (Freeman Patterson)
I decided that expressionism was a cheap way of getting a reaction – show anybody ripped apart, and you get sympathy. I was deliberately trying to show the human body as whole and relatively healthy. (Philip Pearlstein)
The beauties of conception are always superior to those of expression. (Walter J. Phillips)
Despite any will I may have in the matter, what I express interests me more than my ideas. (Pablo Picasso)
Die Brucke (The Bridge) collapsed as the inner convictions of each artist began to differ, but arguably the greatest German artist of the time was Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Working independently, he constructed his own bridge, to link the objective truthfulness of great artists of the past with his own subjective emotions. (Nicolas Pioch)
Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute. (Marcel Proust)
-on writing instructional books...
I love writing the books. It's problem solving: How do I express myself more succinctly? (Charles Reid)
Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion. (Kate Reid)
Style in painting is the same as in writing – a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
Most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
I shall have more to say when I am dead. (Edwin Arlington Robinson)
I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self. (Mark Rothko)
We express our art in everything we say, everything we feel, and everything we do. The creation is ongoing, it is endless, it is happening in every moment. (Don Miguel Ruiz)
Reason is powerless in the expression of Love. (Rumi)
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change. (John Ruskin)
The artist should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. (Albert Pinkham Ryder)
Beyond useless discussions of figurative or abstract art is the imperious necessity to express oneself as one is, making ours all the energetic possibilities of the universe. (Antonio Saura)
- The Power of Music, 1964)...
Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment - and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture. (Dmitri Shostakovich)
I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression. (Anna Deavere Smith)
The goal of art was the vital expression of self. (Alfred Stieglitz)
But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. (Mark Strand)
It is a big mistake to think that the best way to express yourself is to do whatever you want, acting as you please. This is not expressing yourself. If you know what to do exactly, and you do it, then you can express yourself fully. (Shunryu Suzuki)
There is something evocative about the idea of destruction. This act of destruction is the expression of an idea... that what we call reality is not real at all. When I draw a head, for example, I immediately feel an urge to destroy it, to erase it, because the drawing only captures an outward appearance, and for me the vital issue is what lies behind the visual form of the head. (Antoni Tapies)
As an artist you may spend years searching for expression. When you find the medium you truly love, expression finds you. (Cindy Testerink)
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art. (Leo Tolstoy)
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work. (Mark Twain)
A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. (Mark Twain)
It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. (Brenda Ueland)
A painter shows you what he painted, but an artist shows you why he painted. (Author unknown)
To express one's inner self so that others can understand you, is art. If your expressions are elevated and beautiful, it is good art. (Author unknown)
We must always apologize for talking painting. (Paul Valery)
There is no need to express art in terms of nature. It can perfectly well be expressed in terms of geometry and the exact sciences. (Georges Vantongerloo)
These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off. (Giorgio Vasari)
In searching for a fresh vocabulary of expression... painters sought inspiration in arts formerly perceived to be 'primitive' and naive or as standing somehow at the childhood of art. (Joan M. Vastokas)
To stifle creative expression is to bind and gag our very souls. (Curtis Verdun)
Try to concentrate on impact and personal expressiveness, rather than technique. What comprises a finished statement? One brush stroke or one hundred - a decision each one of us has to resolve in our own way. (Van Waldron)
Don't be afraid of expressing what you really mean in your art, what you really feel. Say it visually, as strongly as you can. Push as
far a reach as you can, then go all the way! (Kay WalkingStick)
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. (Alan Watts)
Indeed, man only exists insofar as he expresses himself. Music does it in musical ideas. (Anton Webern)
All art is the expression of one and the same thing - the relation of the spirit of man to the spirit of other men and to the world. (Reginald Howard Wilenski)
It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. (Jeanette Winterson)
What can be shown, cannot be said. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Where the hand goes, the eye follows; where the eye goes the mind follows; where the mind goes, the heart follows, and thus is born expression. (Sanskrit writing)
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