• Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But it's very rare. You have to be able to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• All artists are vain, they long to be recognised and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Even as old as I am, it doesn’t stop me from looking at men...as if anything might happen, as if life were about to start again; often when I go out in the evening I flirt as if I were only 50. We ought to be able to change our engines. This is the artist’s privilege—to be ageless. Passion keeps you young, and passion and liberty are so seductive. When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I don’t think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck. It is not hereditary, thank goodness.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist or I'd draw a ram's head really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect spiderman.
  Jean Michel Basquiat Quotes
• I am not a black artist, I am an artist.
  Jean Michel Basquiat Quotes
• "The Artist" -- I wonder how that would sound...
  Carmen Electra Quotes
• An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.
  Vincent van Gogh Quotes
• An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• Those who work in a preconceived style, deliberately turning their backs on nature, miss the truth. An artist must recognize, when he is reasoning, that his picture is an artifice; but when he is painting, he should feel that he has copied nature. And even when he departs from nature, he must do it with the conviction that it is only to interpret her more fully.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• . . I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility. Inspired by certain pages of Delacroix, an artist like Signac is preoccupied with complementary colors, and the theoretical knowledge of them will lead him to use a certain tone in a certain place. But I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
  It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
  Pablo Picasso Quotes
• My mother said to me 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
  Pablo Picasso Quotes
• New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements ... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• Gimme a beer. I'm a great painter — gimme a beer!
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity.. toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea.. and the idea and the observer.. To achieve this clarity is inevitably to be understood.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• I've been busy since I started - since I was a working artist. If I wasn't showing in New York I was doing work in Germany, or I was doing portraits.
  Andy Warhol Quotes