Vincent Van Gogh Quotes

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

The artist is called a creator.

Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.