Artistic Form Quotes

The problem with trying to make a film good and have it work for an audience is the problem of trying to tell a story well. The shape or the color of it doesn't matter.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I turned to the novel, an artistic form which had in former days been neglected and had thus acquired a bad reputation, but which during the nineteenth century had developed and elevated itself to the ranks occupied by drama and the ancient epic.

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone, Can nature show as fair?

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.

What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Art without technique is invertebrate, shapeless, characterless.

Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.

I thought about trying to do a strip. I even tried to do it, but I felt I didn't have the voice. Even though I liked that form, I didn't think I thought in the form of the three panels.

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual.

I see a correlation between short stories and songs, because of their length and for what they're meant to evoke. Combine certain words with melodies and it all becomes very moving.

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

People're artists they're doing something, taking a hunk of chaps, giving it some order, some form, and presenting it saying here is my little song and dance, my chaos.

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.

The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.