Art

Great art holds meaning, questions existence and contributes to the evolution of human understanding.

Adopt a creative process with a focus on questioning existence and contributing to the evolution of human understanding.

Our most profound and meaningful pursuit can be the creation of something that resonates with the very essence of our humanity. Meaningful work can transcend the ephemeral nature of fame. Focus on creating meaningful work, and fame may naturally follow.

Appreciate compliments from others, but don't let them distract you from your pursuit of improvement.

Art is scientifically proven to be good for the mind & body. Awe, wonder and beauty promote healing. Losing oneself in music, beholding art – has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy. Art can be like a walk in nature, which has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy.

Shilagh Mirgain, PhD was quoted as saying, “Awe has many important implications for our well-being. Experiencing awe can give us a sense of hope and provide a feeling of fulfilment.

Understand that art has no boundaries. And allow yourself to be open to exploring new ideas and techniques.

Fame needs to be the secondary outcome of our pursuit of meaning.

Let your unique creativity guide you like a distant light, leading you to become the best artist you can be.

To get out of our own way form creative habits and rituals, and flow through your self and trust what comes.

We need to stay true to what inspires us. As artists we don't really have a choice if we're following our muse.

We trust our own hearts and draw from the source in each of us. In a nutshell we all must move past self-sabotage and begin to live our authentic calling.

A great secret successful artists know is that the profound can be reached best by concentrating on the mundane. Want to be an artist? Make art in the studio.

From Steven Pressfield: You are an artist too—whether you realise it or not, whether you like it or not—and you have an artist’s journey. Will you live it out? Will you follow your Muse and do the work you were born to do? Ready or not, you are called.

To get out of our own way we need to form creative habits and rituals and use our inner genius. We need to stay true to what inspires us.

Steven also points out that artists don't really have a choice if they're following their muse. The artist is not expressing himself. He is discovering himself.

Steven states The artist is being driven from a far deeper and more primal source than the conscious intellect. It is not an overstatement, in my view, to declare that the artist has no idea what he’s doing.

The more I paint the more I like everything. Jean-Michel Basquiat

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. This second, we can sit down and do our work.

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.

Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices.

We can't be anything we want to be.

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.

It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second we can turn the tables on Resistance.

This second, we can sit down and do our work.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

Resistance is always lying and always full of shit

The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration

The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.

The distinction between subjective and objective art is basically meditation. Anything that comes out of the mind will remain subjective art, and anything that comes out of no-mind, out of silence, out of meditation, will be objective art.

The subjective art is a kind of vomiting. You are filled with so much rubbish; you want to get rid of it, and the only way to get rid of it is to throw it on the canvas, on the musical instruments. Objective art is coming out of a silence so deep...it is almost an expression, to convey to you that this silence is possible in everybody. Objective art has a message. Subjective art has a madness.

If doing comes out of your mind, full of thoughts, then it is subjective. If your doing pours out of silence, blissfulness, serenity, ecstasy, then the same doing has a different flavor, a different significance; it becomes objective.

All that has to be remembered is that it is coming out of a silence within you. This definition is simple and will destroy your confusion. Whether you are creating something -- you may be a sculptor, you may be a carpenter, you may be a painter, a poet, a singer, a musician -- all that has to be remembered is that it is coming out of a silence within you, that it has a spontaneity. It is not prearranged, preprogrammed, pre-thought. As you are creating something you go on being surprised yourself -- you have left yourself in the hands of existence.

Now your hands are not your own hands. They are simply following what the existence longs for. You are not to interfere, you have just to be a watcher -- a watcher of your own creative activity. From the doer you have to shift to being just a watcher.

Just a little change -- let your meditation be your art...but meditation has the priority; art is only a by-product. Meditation cannot be a by-product of anything.

The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. Neil Gaiman

The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.

I like kids' work more than work by real artists any day.

I think I make art for myself, but ultimately I think I make it for the world.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realise that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.

I was trying to communicate an idea; I was trying to paint a very urban landscape. I was trying to make paintings different from the paintings that I saw a lot of at the time, which were mostly minimal, and they were highbrow and alienating, and I wanted to make very direct paintings that most people would feel the emotion behind when they saw them.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.

The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits; he has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal; and while others may perhaps admire him, he laments the fact that he has not yet reached the point whither his better genius only lights the way for him like a distant sun.

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, thus far and no farther.

It seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.

The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.

Do you want to be like that? A faceless, mindless, heartless being? Do you want to experience death before death? Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it. Think about it. Think about saving your self.

Nobody can save you but yourself and it will be easy enough to fail so very easily but don’t, don’t, don’t. Just watch them. Listen to them. 

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.

Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that s already inside it but something that happens inside you.

Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go.

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.

Put out as much as you can. It doesn't do anything sitting on a shelf.

Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.

The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules.

One eye sees, the other feels.See with one eye, feel with the other.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.

Art does not reproduce what we see.It makes us see.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

Art is the proper task of life.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is. 

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

You don't make art, you find it.

My hand tells me what I’m thinking.

Who knows where songs come from? You just have to sit there and I always feel like, you know, Michael Jackson said one time, you have to let God in the room. I think that's exactly true. You have to sit there and relinquish all control. I think people think when you write and you create, you're the person in control and you're making all this happen as if you're, you know, some kind of magician or something, but it's not really that.

You sit there and you become an antenna and you just let things happen through you and the more you let it happen, the more you relinquish control, I think the more beautiful it is. It becomes something that has almost nothing to do with you and the songs, if people like the songs and they get played on the radio or sold at stores, they get played in bars around the world or whatever, they're not yours anymore. They have nothing to do with you anymore. If I hear a song of mine someplace, it's almost like I had nothing to do with it and I love that feeling.

Take action on your highest excitement at every given moment, no matter how small it may be.

To get out of our own way form creative habits and rituals, and flow through your self and trust what comes.

Let your art be a product of your meditation, let your work come out of a silence within you, a spontaneity, not prearranged, preprogrammed, pre-thought. Let your own work surprise you, shift to becoming a watcher of your own creative activity.

Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something.

The most important thing about being an artist is to work.

The job of the artist in their lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and be it.

Artists tend to have a deep-rooted desire to express themselves through their art. When they don't create, they may feel a gnawing hunger or a sense of unfulfillment, which can affect their well-being.

We can give value to our existence by behaving as if our very existence were a work of art.

The best thing one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

Matisse believes that art should be something like a comfortable armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

Banksy thinks that modern art is a disaster area and that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.

Basquiat believed that influence is not influence and instead it is simply someone’s idea going through his new mind.

Beethoven believes that art and knowledge can raise men to the divine.

Bukowski advises aspiring artists to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that come from the top of the head and out of the heart. He also advises them to not be discouraged by criticism and to always remember that they are worth saving.

Eno believes that artworks should not be thought of as objects but rather triggers for experiences. He also believes that attention is what creates value and that artworks are made as well by how people interact with them.

Neil Gaiman advises to use your unique voice, mind, story, and vision to surprise yourself and to make mistakes nobody has ever made before. He encourages to make art, read books, and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful.

Andreas Gursky believes that vision is an intelligent form of thought, and that art should be looking at what's behind something. He believes that the more horrible this world is, the more abstract art becomes, and that intuition is a good thing.

Paul Klee suggests to see with one eye and feel with the other, to make art like a holiday, and to make up your own rules. He also believes that art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something and that there is no substitute for intuition.

Henri Matisse believes that art should be like a good armchair to rest from physical fatigue, and that much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium. He believes that truth and reality in art do not arise until one no longer understands what they are doing, and that a young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave. He also believes that art should be a meditation on nature, and that all that is not useful in a picture is detrimental.

The distinction between subjective and objective art is based on meditation. Anything that comes out of the mind will remain subjective art, and anything that comes out of no-mind, out of silence, out of meditation, will be objective art.

Subjective art is an artist expressing their personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences through their work. It can be seen as a release of emotions or ideas that the artist wants to share with the audience, often through a variety of mediums such as painting or music.

Objective art is derived from a deep sense of silence and contemplation. The silence in objective art refers to a profound state of inner peace and tranquility that the artist experiences. This state enables them to create art that is more focused and clear, and it is meant to convey to the audience that such a state of mind is achievable for everyone.

The primary way you will know it is working is that you will begin to feel a sense of harmony, a sense of synchronicity, a sense of flow, a sense of ease, a sense of peace, a sense of joy, and a sense of excitement. That will be your sign that you are on the right track.

If you imagine your art can't support you, they will not be capable of demonstrating that it can support you. If you can't imagine how it would support you then there is something in your imagination that needs dusting. You need to have a stronger imagination. And you need to know that if you imagine bigger, you will experience bigger. If you imagine small, you'll experience small. Okay. Yes?

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