Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.
Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.
With the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive.
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Color and I are one. I am a painter.
This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.
The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.
Art is freedom. If we don't have that element, we don't feel human anymore. Art is not decoration or a function. Before all that, art is art. This connection to meaning - our inner, intuitive knowledge - is something.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.
My goal from the very beginning was just to write good songs that don't require any production to be felt or understood. I wanted to be able to sit in a room with a guitar and play the song from beginning to end and have it be as impactful as if you heard the studio version with all the bells and whistles.
I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.
In every work of art, the artist himself is present.
What makes a tight circle or a tight little square box more of an intellectual statement than something done emotionally, I don't know. Art is an essence, a center.
Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.
All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
It's always about the music, never about anything else.
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.
Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.
What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.
