Brian Michael Bendis Quotes

Art is something in which you are never an expert at any point of time. It's something you hone all the time and something which is elusive all the time.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.

I was in art school since I was five years old. I've always been to art school.

Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.

You have to make thousands and thousands of drawings before an illustration is perfected.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

I can concentrate on my art.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

Great art is created only through diligent and painstaking effort to perfect and polish oneself.

All works of art should begin... at the end.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline.

Know that the secret of the arts is to correct nature.

When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

I sketch the faces upside down because it's like drawing from the left side of the brain or the right side of the brain. I never took an art lesson in my life.

My art practice is very detail-, labor- intensive and I think that that's a way of slowing myself down so that I can hear myself think. That quieter voice has sometimes the more interesting idea, if I can get to it.

A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

The fine arts thing at college was always too much for me to think about. What I was more involved in was being successful at arts school.

A work of art doesn't dare you to realize it. It germinates and gestates by itself.

How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.