Artistic Mystery Quotes

You can go to the moon or walk under the sea, or anything else you like, but painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation. It remains there like a question. And it alone gives the answer.

Diane Arbus is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly daring artists of the 20th century. Her work emerged from a deeply private place and profoundly affected all those who came into contact with it.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.

'Rhye' clearly plays with notions of sexual identity, and it has made a concerted effort to keep its own identity mysterious. Its love songs are gender-neutral, the members have declined to appear in their own videos, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a photo of the duo that doesn't cast them in shadows.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.

The tricky thing is music is supposed to be very mysterious; the way it's made is mysterious. Then people like to get upset with the music business.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.

For the life of me, I'll never understand how you can be an artist but not want people to understand who you are as a person.

Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.

To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.

The moment at which music reveals its true nature is contained in the ancient exercise of the theme with variations. The complete mystery of music is explained right there.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

I take music very seriously, but it's important to me that my music is - I don't know if 'intuitive' is the word, but there's a really important element of something kind of mysterious. It's not academic or esoteric.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.