Artistic Lineage Quotes

Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.

The novel tradition is the closest thing I have to a religion, and being a part of that tradition means a lot to me. I don't really see - I never have seen - why I should have to forfeit that feeling, or hope, of belonging, just because the stories I want to tell are close to my own experience.

Both my parents were painters.

I could have been born into any family. I was fortunate that I was born to an artist as extraordinary as Picasso, and Picasso turned out to be the family business.

I come from a family of artists.

There's a real passing down in the theater, almost ad nauseam. You have to listen to older people talk about their experience, but it makes you very aware of what has come before you or what is coming after you - that you're a part of a link in a chain. It's not all about you.

My mother really didn't come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, "The only artists I've ever heard of are dead." The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn't know anything about being an artist.

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts.

I had this sense that I was part of, sort of a lineage of artists and writers through history that have had mood disorders.

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

I don't come from a family of artists.

Everyone in my family is an artist in some capacity whether they're musicians, painters, or sculptors, so it's in their blood.

Everyone in my family has some kind of artistic tendency. My great grandmother was a jewelry designer, and her daughter was a ceramic tile muralist.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.

I've been drawing since I was about 3 and I come from a family of artists.

'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.

I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.

We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.

My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it.

I'm in a hallowed league of artists. Whether it's Billie Holiday or Rakim or Jimmy Hendrix or... I don't know, MGMT, we're all blessed to be able to create. It's a lineage that extends a long time. And to be able to be active in it and have made a difference in it, it's humbling. To know I had a place in all of this; that's the rewarding part.

I do see, in some younger writers, elements and things that I have used - and I am very touched and flattered because I am part of a tapestry that is being absorbed by authors.

My mom is a painter and photographer and my grandfather was an artist, so I've always been surrounded by creative people.