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The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need. (Stella Adler)
A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original. (Louis Armstrong)
We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce... directly and without meditation. (Hans Jean Arp)
Perhaps one of the most essential exercises in learning to paint is the copying of master works in the museums. (Igor Babailov)
If there are similarities, it's simply because the same thoughts that occurred to other people also occurred to me. (Brad Bird)
You can copyright your art, but not your artistic vision. (Robert Bissett)
The difference between a bad artist and a good one is the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does. (William Blake)
Once you set out to copy another painter you can never be more than number two. (Sergei Bongart)
Reviewer: 'One of your themes was very similar to one of Beethoven's!' Brahms replied, 'Of course it is. Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly.' (Johannes Brahms)
Copying opens your eyes to new possibilities, and new techniques... but trying to fob it off as your own is quite another matter. (Louise Bunn)
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul. (Emily Carr)
When you have practiced drawing for a while... take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best works that you can find done by the hand of great masters. (Cennino Cennini)
I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake. (Gustave Courbet)
It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel. (Malcolm Cowley)
If you are a true artist and not a copyist, no matter how much you covet the work of others, what you produce is going to be uniquely yours. (Warren Criswell)
I don't want people to copy Matisse or Picasso, although it is entirely proper to admit their influence. I don't make paintings like theirs. I make paintings like mine. (Stuart Davis)
It would seem that copying photographs is never considered plagiarism... Shouldn't real artists get past the point of copying the finished work of fine art photographers? (Robb Debenport)
If my students seem to copy me when they are learning, that is good. It shows they are listening and trying to do what I tell them. They will develop their own style soon enough. (William Draper)
But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be; / Within that circle none durst walk but he. (John Dryden)
Pictorial art is relating tones to create beauty - like chords of music - not the faithful copying of the model. (Harvey Dunn)
Those who only copy are not and will never be 'real artists.' (Gwen Fox)
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. (Northrop Frye)
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else. (Judy Garland)
Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second... You see the sequence. (Paul Gauguin)
There is no such thing as intellectual property. (Jean-Luc Godard)
- Gruppe on Color...
Here's the important difference between tight and loose painting: tight, meticulous work can be copied - even a reasonably clever student could do it. But loose, spontaneous work is full of accident and inspiration. And great paintings done in this manner can never be duplicated - the painter himself doesn't know how he got some of his effects. (Emile Gruppe)
The things we counterfeit are not worth the trouble of falling into disgrace with ourselves. (Henry S. Haskins)
Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first. (J. E. Hedges)
The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes. (Michael Heizer)
You've got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate. (Damien Hirst)
They're building walls faster than we can make original art to go on it. Reproductions are the answer. (Kiff Holland)
Once all the technical devices are well learned, it deadens the soul to use those skills to clone the work of others. (Joseph Jahn)
Copies are just that, copies - not the real thing. If one sets standards low enough, they are easily reached. (Shari Jones)
A painting or a picture is not a real copy of the actual object or person. It is a co-ordination of line, color and form in space. The Artist's life gives him his content and that content is expressed through line, color and form. (Jyotsna Kadam)
Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. (Austin Kleon)
I do one that I can think of as a master. Then I run them off on my computer and go over them with some chalk and colored pencils and stuff. Before you run them through the computer, you stain the paper first, otherwise the ink will bleed. And then it looks fine. It looks like a million dollars. Or half a million, I suppose. (Mark A. Landis)
It's not everyday one decides to live poorly, but every day he does until it's no longer affordable; the result of which are hand painted reproductions of another artist's servitude. (G. Langholtz)
- advice to a student...
Copy the works of the Almighty first and those of Turner next. (Edward Lear)
If you just copy your subject matter you're missing ninety per cent of the art. (David Leffel)
One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work. (Robert Longo)
If you absolutely have to appropriate someone else's work do us the favour of being a genius and make it say something entirely new. (Lori Lukasewich)
Every stroke in the work of John Singer Sargent's work has a purpose and a reason for being on the canvas... it is impossible to copy him. (Annie MacIntosh)
Only God creates. The rest of us just copy. (Michelangelo)
Copying has been a time-honored means of learning how to do anything. (Gabriella Morrison)
Copying or cloning is not valid because it misses the whole point of art making. (Odette Nicholson)
Every conceivable aspect of painting has its roots in copying. Painters are by nature copyists. (Leonard Niles)
Copying for profit is not artistry. An artist needs to feel the work, see it taking shape, and discover the magic. (Ben Novak)
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could... I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at... not copy it. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
A copying artist should get permission or pay the original artist a fee. (oliver)
Creative people are supposedly those who do not copy or imitate others; copying is supposedly theft. To deny people the right to copy, intimately, from others, is to deny the essence of what it is to be a creative person. (William Patry)
Annoyance arises from the feared implication that we are copyists in subject or treatment, or both, whereas the common qualities that establish the relationship result merely from a similarity of method. (Walter J. Phillips)
Copying is an art in itself, demanding the greatest technical ability, especially in watercolour. However well done, the copy invariably lacks that nascent, ineffable, but definite quality, provided by the furious enthusiasm with which an original is created, an essential spontaneity that defies reproduction. (Walter J. Phillips)
There is the process of enlarging a watercolour, which actually amounts to copying its good points and improving its bad ones, and is interesting proportionately as the latter increase. (Walter J. Phillips)
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility. (Pablo Picasso)
No artist, if he has original talent, can paint like another. (Joseph Plaskett)
There is no harm in repeating a good thing. (Plato)
People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn't copy my style from anybody. (Elvis Presley)
A true artist is born with a unique voice and cannot copy; so he has only to copy to prove his originality. (Radiquet)
- interview with Shirley Kaneda, 1994...
I think there's a distinction to be made between the appropriation which is a time-honored device used by artists where they borrow or steal from other cultures, genres, individuals, in order to enrich their own work and to make of the stolen goods something new and the appropriation which is a self-conscious reason for the entire existence of the work. I don't think I'm cynical when I appropriate forms. The nearest I come to that is when I see it as a useful ironic device. (Fiona Rae)
Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it. (Robert Rauschenberg)
The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color; yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
No art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
Copying clarifies the line between doing your own work and appropriating someone else's. I think of it as a valid learning tool that should be set aside when you become a professional. (Cindy Ricksgers)
Copying is not art, it is technique. Art is perception. (Norman Ridenour)
Xerox copies, Artists Create. (CJ Rider)
It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks. (Bridget Riley)
Copying can give you insights into somebody else's process, which may help you to a new level. But copying is a tool, not an answer. (Skip Rohde)
Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world... paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. (Jerry Saltz)
In the '50s, to appropriate was a real no-no. However, once you go from Duchamp to Jasper Johns to Warhol, appropriation becomes not only a common thing to do, but possibly the central way of working in the era we call postmodernism. (Irving Sandler)
Living in an age of digital reproduction - where single keystrokes of Copy and Paste can replicate an entire movie, database, or library - has forced us into a state of uncertainty about the status of an object. To compensate, we have developed an entire vocabulary to define different types of reproductions: copies, clones, replicas, forgeries. (Rex Sorgatz)
I am just a copier, an impostor. I wait, I read magazines. After a while my brain sends me a product. (Phillipe Starck)
Copying someone's work is not a form of flattery – it's pure theft. (Sandra Stoodley)
People who are afraid of being copied are worrying about nothing. There is no such thing as an original idea. (June Szueber)
If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment. (Wayne Thiebaud)
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
- Europe and Elsewhere...
If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive. (Mark Twain)
The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'Was there ever dog that praised his fleas?' (William Butler Yeats)
Without moving beyond a mere copy, there is no artistry, no originality or artistic advancement; only mechanics. (Jennifer Young)
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