Artistic Expertise Quotes

You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

He who pretends to be either painter or engraver without being a master of drawing is an imposter.

The thing is that when you are a director, you need to be involved in a lot of different fields. You must be a psychologist, an architecture expert; you must be a choreographer.

I've essentially done theater for more of my life than I've done television or film, and it's really something I feel I know better.

I don’t know much about the arts, so I’m going to keep my cotton-picking hands off and let you people take care of it.

I don't claim to be a musician, I didn't go to Julliard.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Craft is not a category; it's a means. The folks running the museum [Museum of Arts and Design]are sharp, and they know this, but they are in a bind.

I had done it all in my career. I always felt, as a kid, that that's what a director needed to be. Hitchcock could do anything in my mind. He's the director. That person has to be the best actor, the best designer, the best cinematographer. Then I came to realize that isn't the case. You just need to surround yourself with the best.

And the part about being a professional artist is that you can tell, and you can do it over again, even if you can't say how you got there exactly.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

Art can only be taught by artists.

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

Technical Expertise is composed of all the little and large bits of technique known to the skilled painter, musician, actor, any artist. He adds these things together in his basic presentation. He knows what he is doing. And how to do it. And then to his he adds his message.

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

I've never met any artist who illustrated one of my books, although I've corresponded briefly with one. I have always been impressed by the technical expertise involved in the covers, even if sometimes puzzled by the subject matter.

The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whether he is going. Practice must always be founded on sound theory, and to this Perspective is the guide and the gateway; and without this nothing can be done well in the matter of drawing.

It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.

Pytheos made a mistake by not observing that the arts are each composed of two things, the actual work and the theory of it. One of these, the doing of the work, is proper to men trained in the individual subject, while the other the theory is common to all scholars.

If a nonartist teaches a subject called art, it is nonart.

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.

An artist must only judge of what he understands, his field is just as limited as that of any other specialist... That in his sphere there are no questions, but only answers, can only be maintained by those who have never written and have had no experience of thinking in images.

I also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to make use of this knowledge because it enriches the overall texture of life.

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.